Lexington
He needs a lot more than one minute to set himself free
IN THE summer of 1912 Harry Houdini was clapped in manacles and leg-irons, stuffed into a crate that had been weighed down by lead, and dropped from a tugboat into New York’s East River. Less than a minute later, he was free. That, more or less, is the trick Barack Obama is currently trying to copy.
Of course, Mr Obama has not been tossed overboard literally. But consider his trajectory so far. He campaigned in poetry (2008), governed in prose (2009) and then the wheels fell off his presidency. Although 2010 brought legislative gains, including the great prize of health reform, the year was bracketed by political losses. At its beginning he lost his supermajority in the Senate. By its end he had lost his majority in the House. An immobilised president who lacks the numbers to put his measures through Congress might just as well be trussed up in a crate.
Unless he is an escapologist, that is. Well before November’s mid-term shellacking turfed the Democratic majority out of the House, Obama-watchers wondered whether this president had the ideological flexibility to do what Bill Clinton did in the same predicament after the mid-terms of 1994. Now, after the tax deal Mr Obama struck last week with the Republican leadership, under which the “temporary” Bush-era tax reductions that were supposed to expire on December 31st look set to be extended for everyone, they have at least the beginning of an answer. Like Mr Clinton, this man can turn on a dime.
Mr Obama promised repeatedly to increase taxes on the rich (ie, individuals earning more than $200,000 and couples earning more than $250,000). How does he justify changing his mind? Simple: politics is the art of the possible, elections have consequences and the Democrats lacked the numbers they needed (the Senate had tried and failed) to keep the tax reduction in place for poorer Americans but let them expire for the rich. If he had not budged, he says, the Republicans would have let everyone’s taxes rise—a blow not only to taxpayers but also to economic growth. Besides, to sweeten the bitter medicine, Mr Obama managed in his negotiations to attach a mini-stimulus that the Republicans would never otherwise have countenanced.
All of this makes perfect sense. But it makes the sort of sense that in the 1950s inspired Nye Bevan, a firebrand on the left of Britain’s Labour Party, to describe the centrist Hugh Gaitskell as a “desiccated calculating machine”. Like Gaitskell, Mr Obama now stands accused by his own party’s bitter progressives of lacking fire, fight, principle and backbone. “Hardly anybody in the Democratic caucus here feels that the president tried hard enough to deliver on his campaign promises,” said Alan Grayson of Florida. Mr Obama did not help his cause with the left by lashing out at “sanctimonious” purists who would prefer to feel good themselves than do what was good for the people.
If you are a president who has just suffered the political equivalent of being stuffed in a crate and dropped in a river, does it make sense to antagonise your own party this way? Maybe. When faced with impasse, wriggling through the middle does not have to be dishonourable. It can even lead to political recovery. It was presumably to make this point that Mr Obama invited Mr Clinton, the consummate comeback kid, to a press conference at the White House, where the old charmer and pioneer of “triangulation” pronounced the tax compromise “a good deal” and told a new generation of political reporters that “there’s never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan.”
Mr Obama’s good fortune is that it is not only progressives who find the deal unpalatable. Conservatives hate it too. Charles Krauthammer, an influential columnist, calls it “the swindle of the year”: the artless Republicans let Mr Obama smuggle in a huge new stimulus, bigger than the first, just in time for his re-election bid in 2012. Mitt Romney, seeking the Republican nomination once again, is unhappy that the tax cuts have not been made permanent. Tea-partiers hate the burden on the deficit. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina complains that the deal “raises the death tax” (in fact it would reinstate the estate tax, suspended in 2010 only, at a lower level than planned).
If Mr Obama’s luck holds, the passionate intensity of the conservatives might just cancel out that of the progressives and so affirm, in the eyes of the majority in the centre, his own claim to be reaching for precious common ground in the tricky terrain of divided government. That cannot be what Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, the Republican leaders in Congress, intended when they made their deal with the president. But, having made it, they too risk losing face if they allow it to unravel.
Houdini performed his trick for startled audiences over and over again. Mr Obama will find doing this harder. The incoming Republicans have no interest in allowing him a repeat performance, and there is a limit to the number of times a president seeking re-election can trample on the feelings of his own party.
Besides, to win re-election in 2012 Mr Obama needs to prove that he is more than an escapologist or a calculating machine. Some of the fire, fight, principle and backbone that has gone missing since the inspiring campaign of 2008 has to become visible again. He has said recently that he is guided by a “north star”, that America is passing through another “Sputnik moment”, that he intends to reform the tax code and tackle the deficit. But none of this has yet cohered into a clear vision for the next two years. Even his shrinking band of steadfast supporters worries now that, along with his loss of the House and the fraying of his coalition, Mr Obama has lost his sense of direction. He had better disabuse them soon. The British might occasionally elect a desiccated calculating machine. Americans expect something more.
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