Obama's first year: What went wrong

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As the Obama administration marks its first birthday, there iso reason to shop around for the perfect present. What President Barack Obamaeeds most is obvious: aew political strategy — ideally one more grounded in the realities of governance than the one he embraced a year ago Wednesday. Republican Scott Brown’s astonishing Senate victory in Massachusetts doesot spell doom for Obama’s agenda, even if many Democrats are acting as though it does. He remains a president who scores more than 50 percent in most polls and whose party controls Congress. That’s more than enough clout for an ambitious president to dominate Washington. But Massachusetts marked the final, crushing piece of evidence against the theory of the case that animated Obama’s first year. Simply put, that theory — which made some sense a year ago — turned out to be wrong. Specifically, it was wrong on three major counts: • Obama and his team believed that the 2008 election represented something seismic — in other words, something fundamental and long-lasting — in the country’s governing landscape. They believed that the historical cycle had turned, that voters hadot only rejected George W. Bush’s brash conservatism but also moved beyond Bill Clinton’s tepid and defensive-minded progressivism. Theation’s problems and mood put momentum behind Obama’s vision of robust, large-scale government action. But there had beeno seismic shift. The country’s ideology is fluid — and depends on perceptions of the econoour and the daily flow ofews out of Washington. The assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming wasaive in retrospect. • Obama believed that early success would be self-reinforcing, building a powerful momentum for bold government action. This belief was the essence of the White House’s theory of the “big bang” — that success in passing a big stimulus package would lead to success in passing health care, which in turn would clear the way for major cap-and-trade environmental legislation and “re-regulation” of the financial services sector — all in the first year. This proved to be a radical misreading of the dynamics of power. The massive cost of the stimulus package and industry bailouts — combined with the inconvenient fact that unemployment went up after their passage — meant that Obama spent the year bleeding momentum rather than steadily increasing public confidence in his larger governing vision. That vision was further obscured for many Americans by the smoke from the bitter and seemingly endless legislative battle on Capitol Hill over health care. • Most devoutly of all, the Obama team believed that there was something singular about the president’s appeal and ability to inspire.This faith seemed well-placed in the context of 2008, when Obama won states such as Virginia that Democrats hadot carried in decades. But it was misplaced in the context of 2009. Virtually everything Obama did to fill in the blanks on the timing and specifics of the agenda he had run on managed simultaneously to unite Republicans in opposition and divide Democrats into camps that thought he was going too far or that thought he wasot going far enough. These three miscalculationsow, at the start of Year Two, lead to two urgent questions: • Can Obama salvage a partial deal on health care so that — in combination with his record in halting the financial meltdown that greeted him a year ago — he could claim that his first year was at least a “medium bang” Ifot, his first year will go down as a big fizzle. • What is theew governing strategyow that the defects of the old one have been exposed It is clear that Obama’sew theory of the