American politics after health reform

Now what?

Barack Obama needs to use a bruising victory to unleash the promise of his presidency

LAST November Henry Kissinger compared Barack Obama to a chess grandmaster who had played his opening in six simultaneous matches, but hadn’t completed a single game. Now the president has won the first of those matches with an audacious checkmate snatched from a seemingly hopeless position. But the rest of the chessboards are still gridlocked.

The health-care victory this week was a huge achievement for Mr Obama (see article). After the Democrats in January suddenly lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate many, reputedly including his own chief of staff, urged him to play for a draw and settle for a much more modest bill than the 2,400-page behemoth that he signed into law on March 23rd. Instead, the president buckled down: he dumped the (more expensive) House version of the bill, concentrated on the Senate version and criss-crossed the country, making powerful speeches and twisting arms. In short, he took charge, and started doing all the things he ought to have been doing a lot earlier.

His reward, however, is merely the right to continue playing. Had health reform failed after Mr Obama had invested so much of his personal authority in it, his presidency would have been crippled; and a president who is weak at home tends to be perceived as weak abroad as well. Success thus gives Mr Obama a chance to get his presidency back on track, but hardly guarantees it. That depends on him learning from his mistakes and not exaggerating the extent of his success.

A polarising moment

Health care itself is a good example. Universal health coverage has been a goal of Democrats for decades, so Mr Obama’s achieving something pretty near to it has perked up morale in his own party. But he has done a rotten job of selling it to everybody else. Most polls show more Americans oppose Obamacare than approve of it, though that may be changing a little. The signs still point towards his party being kicked hard in the mid-term elections; and the Republicans, not one of whom voted for the bill, say that they will repeal it if they can.

Conservative anger was predictable—and may well backfire. But this is a much worse bill than it might have been. This newspaper supported the final version of Obamacare, but only because we have long maintained that a country as rich as America should provide decent health coverage to all its citizens. Because the bill does almost nothing to control costs, it was a huge missed opportunity. American business, which anyhow feels unloved by this White House, will suffer the consequences (see article).

That is why Mr Obama now needs to produce a credible plan to tackle America’s vast budget deficit. The national public debt is predicted almost to double in the next decade. Beefing up the woefully weak cost-control mechanisms in the health bill will help (and might impress independent voters). But in the end, bringing America’s budget under control requires radical reform to all entitlements. Sadly Mr Obama has repeatedly failed to sketch out how he might go about that.

In theory, budget-cutting offers more room than health care did to lure in those obstructive Republicans: fiscal responsibility is supposedly dear to the hearts of the political right. The hitch is that they show few signs of wanting to help out. They have the excuse that Mr Obama initially did far too little to woo moderate Republicans on health care, handing the project over to leftish Democrats in Congress. But conservatives can claim Obama is hellbent on increasing the power of the government over the economy. By passing a huge stimulus package and then “socialising” an industry that accounts for one-sixth of GDP, Mr Obama, they say, has dragged America further leftward than any president since FDR.

That is unfair. Stimulus was needed. And if the tea-party crowd examined the free-market paradise they think existed before Mr Obama signed the bill, they would find that their government already spent more per citizen on health than most OECD countries do. But, as with the appearance of being anti-business, Mr Obama needs to squash his apparent addiction to big government quickly. There would be no better way than spelling out where he is going to take a hatchet to government spending; but he may also have to revise other costly schemes. His proposed climate-change bill, whose chances of becoming law before the mid-terms look slim, would be much improved if boondoggles were removed from it. Another apparently lost cause, immigration reform, is unpopular with conservatives, but is supported by many businesspeople. The re-regulation of Wall Street is harder for the Republicans to oppose. But in each case the president needs to show more determination and leadership than he has thus far.

Abroad, too, there are chess games in need of bolder gambits. As with health care last year, there has been a lot of verbiage and not much steel. In foreign capitals Mr Obama was starting to be seen as a feeble, perhaps even a one-term, president. China humiliated him by sending a junior minister to lecture him at Copenhagen. Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, recently treated Hillary Clinton to a show of indifference. Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu has spent much of the past month cocking a snook at the White House. Now Mr Obama looks more like a winner, he should act like one.

Second life

It is three months since a deadline for Iran to resolve its nuclear proliferation issues expired; where are the tougher sanctions Mr Obama threatened? If health care showed the virtues of a president getting involved, then so too can the Middle East peace process. A start seemed to be made this week (see article) but it needs to be followed through. A stronger president would make much clearer to the Chinese that he will not give in to Sinophobic protectionist pressures from Congress, but he won’t take instructions about talking to the Dalai Lama either.

Second chances are rare in politics. Mr Obama now has one. Does he want to be remembered as a president who eventually drove through health care but achieved little else? Or will this week mark a turning-point where this enigmatic man became a much more determined, effective president?