http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-02-09/ready-for-prime-time/full/Obama Owns the Room
by Michael Lind
Evan Vucci / AP Photo
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In his answers to questions, Obama improvised the Rooseveltian Fireside Chat that he should have given earlier in his prepared address. He gave concise and clear explanations, in terms that laymen can understand, of the problems that banks have in evaluating their assets, of the role of the stimulus as part of a larger economic-recovery package, and other complex issues, without being either academic or condescending. He gently mocked do-nothing conservatives, while expressing respect for views different from his own. In style, the contrast with the combination of inarticulateness and irritability of his predecessor could not have been greater.
Obama owned the occasion. Even the cynical White House press corps seemed awed, realizing that the president for a change was the smartest person in the room. As if to emphasize their smallness of mind and character, the journalists embarrassed themselves by gotcha questions and even one silly question about steroid use by baseball player Alex Rodriguez. Would Washington journalists at FDR’s first press conference, at the nadir of the Depression, have dared to ask him about Babe Ruth?
Speaking of Rodriguez and Ruth, I have to say that Obama struck out a few times. His claim that there is no pork in the Congressional stimulus package because there are no earmarks is a talking point that invites ridicule and ought to be retired at once. Even worse, he suggested, as he has done before, that he actually believes fiscal conservative propaganda about an imaginary “entitlements crisis.” He made the surreal comment that Republicans ought to face up to the alleged fact that entitlements are a greater danger to the economy than the costs of the stimulus and bailout. Republicans should concede this? What is Obama thinking? It is Republicans who push the misleading “entitlement-reform” meme, as part of their cynical strategy to lump Medicare (the victim of health cost inflation) with Social Security (whose long-term problems are minor), in order to kill Social Security by means-testing it into the status of an unpopular welfare program for the poor only. On the entitlement issue, Obama needs to be deprogrammed by Peter Orszag, his budget director.
Most troubling of all, the president missed a chance to hit a ball out of the park by distinguishing between the $800 billion stimulus plan to “jolt” the economy (in Obama’s phrase) and the $350 billion TARP II program to rescue the banking sector. Obama and the Democrats may have suffered from the confusion of the two programs in the minds of many Americans who think that the $800 billion stimulus package is going to enrich the bankers. This confusion, and not just the adroitness of Republicans in ridiculing particular programs included in the stimulus bill, may account for the fact that Obama’s own popularity is much higher than that of his legislative program. Having failed to do so in his press conference, Obama needs to spend some time in the days and weeks ahead educating the public about the differences between the stimulus and TARP.
But although the new president can improve his game, it is clear that as much as any American politician of our time he has the brains, eloquence and temperament for the job. His masterly performance in his first press conference should dispel any anxiety that he was an appealing candidate but not a competent executive. Obama is back. And so is America.
Michael Lind is the Whitehead senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and the author of The American Way of Strategy. He has been a staff writer or senior editor at The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, and The National Interest.
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