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The flexibility challenge
This article was first published on the Stratfor website. The author, George Friedman, is chairman and CEO of Stratfor, the world’s leading online publisher of geopolitical intelligence.
Three weeks after the U.S. presidential election, we are getting the
first signs of how President-elect Barack Obama will govern. That now
goes well beyond the question of what is conventionally considered U.S.
foreign policy — and thus beyond Stratfor’s domain. At this moment in
history, however, in the face of the global financial crisis,
U.S. domestic policy is intimately bound to foreign policy. How the
United States deals with its own internal financial and economic
problems will directly affect the rest of the world.
One thing the financial crisis has demonstrated is that the world is
very much America-centric, in fact and not just in theory. When the
United States runs into trouble, so does the rest of the globe. It
follows then that the U.S. response to the problem
affects the rest of the world as well. Therefore, Obama’s plans are in
many ways more important to countries around the world than whatever
their own governments might be planning.
Over the past two weeks, Obama has begun to reveal his appointments.
It will be Hillary Clinton at State and Timothy Geithner at Treasury.
According to persistent rumors, current Defense Secretary Robert Gates
might be asked to stay on. The national security adviser has not been
announced, but rumors have the post going to former Clinton
administration appointees or to former military people. Interestingly
and revealingly, it was made very public that Obama has met with Brent
Scowcroft to discuss foreign policy. Scowcroft was national security
adviser under President George H.W. Bush, and while a critic of the
younger Bush’s policies in Iraq from the beginning, he is very much
part of the foreign policy establishment and on the non-neoconservative
right. That Obama met with Scowcroft, and that this was deliberately
publicized, is a signal — and Obama understands political signals —
that he will be conducting foreign policy from the center.
Consider Clinton and Geithner. Clinton voted to authorize the Iraq
war — a major bone of contention between Obama and her during the
primaries. She is also a committed free trade advocate, as was her
husband, and strongly supports continuity in U.S. policy toward Israel
and Iran. Geithner comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
where he participated in crafting the strategies currently being implemented by U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Everything Obama is doing with his appointments is signaling continuity in U.S. policy.
This does not surprise us. As we have written previously, when Obama’s precise statements and position papers
were examined with care, the distance between his policies and John
McCain’s actually was minimal. McCain tacked with the Bush
administration’s position on Iraq — which had shifted, by the summer of
this year, to withdrawal at the earliest possible moment but without a
public guarantee of the date. Obama’s position was a complete
withdrawal by the summer of 2010, with the proviso that unexpected
changes in the situation on the ground could make that date flexible.
Obama supporters believed that Obama’s position on Iraq was
profoundly at odds with the Bush administration’s. We could never
clearly locate the difference. The brilliance of Obama’s presidential
campaign was that he convinced his hard-core supporters that he
intended to make a radical shift in policies across the board, without
ever specifying what policies he was planning to shift, and never
locking out the possibility of a flexible interpretation of his
commitments. His supporters heard what they wanted to hear while a
careful reading of the language, written and spoken, gave Obama
extensive room for maneuver. Obama’s campaign was a master class on
mobilizing support in an election without locking oneself into specific
policies.
As soon as the election results were in, Obama understood that he was in a difficult political situation.
Institutionally, the Democrats had won substantial victories, both in
Congress and the presidency. Personally, Obama had won two very narrow
victories. He had won the Democratic nomination by a very thin margin,
and then won the general election by a fairly thin margin in the
popular vote, despite a wide victory in the electoral college.
Many people have pointed out that Obama won more decisively than any
president since George H.W. Bush in 1988. That is certainly true. Bill
Clinton always had more people voting against him than for him, because
of the presence of Ross Perot on the ballot in 1992 and 1996. George W.
Bush actually lost the popular vote by a tiny margin in 2000; he won it
in 2004 with nearly 51 percent of the vote but had more than 49 percent
of the electorate voting against him. Obama did a little better than
that, with about 53 percent of voters supporting him and 47 percent
opposing, but he did not change the basic architecture of American
politics. He still had won the presidency with a deeply divided
electorate, with almost as many people opposed to him as for him.
Presidents are not as powerful as they are often imagined to be.
Apart from institutional constraints, presidents must constantly deal
with public opinion. Congress is watching the polls, as all of the
representatives and a third of the senators will be running for
re-election in two years. No matter how many Democrats are in Congress,
their first loyalty is to their own careers, and collapsing public
opinion polls for a Democratic president can destroy them. Knowing
this, they have a strong incentive to oppose an unpopular president —
even one from their own party — or they might be replaced with others
who will oppose him. If Obama wants to be powerful, he must keep
Congress on his side, and that means he must keep his numbers up. He is
undoubtedly getting the honeymoon bounce now. He needs to hold that.
Obama appears to understand this problem clearly. It would take a
very small shift in public opinion polls after the election to put him
on the defensive, and any substantial mistakes could sink his approval
rating into the low 40s. George W. Bush’s basic political mistake in
2004 was not understanding how thin his margin was. He took his
election as vindication of his Iraq policy, without understanding how
rapidly his mandate could transform itself in a profound reversal of
public opinion. Having very little margin in his public opinion polls,
Bush doubled down on his Iraq policy. When that failed to pay off, he
ended up with a failed presidency.
Bush was not expecting that to happen, and Obama does not expect it
for himself. Obama, however, has drawn the obvious conclusion that what
he expects and what might happen are two different things. Therefore,
unlike Bush, he appears to be trying to expand his approval ratings as
his first priority, in order to give himself room for maneuver later.
Everything we see in his first two weeks of shaping his presidency
seems to be designed two do two things: increase his standing in the
Democratic Party, and try to bring some of those who voted against him
into his coalition.
In looking at Obama’s supporters, we can divide them into two blocs.
The first and largest comprises those who were won over by his persona;
they supported Obama because of who he was, rather than because of any
particular policy position or because of his ideology in anything more
than a general sense. There was then a smaller group of supporters who
backed Obama for ideological reasons, built around specific policies
they believed he advocated. Obama seems to think, reasonably in our
view, that the first group will remain faithful for an extended period
of time so long as he maintains the aura he cultivated during his
campaign, regardless of his early policy moves. The second group, as is
usually the case with the ideological/policy faction in a party, will
stay with Obama because they have nowhere else to go — or if they turn
away, they will not be able to form a faction that threatens his
position.
What Obama needs to do politically, then, is protect and strengthen
the right wing of his coalition: independents and republicans who voted
for him because they had come to oppose Bush and, by extension, McCain.
Second, he needs to persuade at least 5 percent of the electorate who
voted for McCain that their fears of an Obama presidency were
misplaced. Obama needs to build a positive rating at least into the
mid-to-high 50s to give him a firm base for governing, and leave
himself room to make the mistakes that all presidents make in due
course.
With the example of Bush’s failure before him, as well as Bill
Clinton’s disastrous experience in the 1994 mid-term election, Obama is
under significant constraints in shaping his presidency. His selection
of Hillary Clinton is meant to nail down the rightward wing of his
supporters in general, and Clinton supporters in particular. His
appointment of Geithner at the Treasury and the rumored re-appointment
of Gates as secretary of defense are designed to reassure the leftward
wing of McCain supporters that he is not going off on a radical tear.
Obama’s gamble is that (to select some arbitrary numbers), for every
alienated ideological liberal, he will win over two lukewarm McCain
supporters.
To those who celebrate Obama as a conciliator, these appointments
will resonate. For those supporters who saw him as a fellow ideologue,
he can point to position papers far more moderate and nuanced than what
those supporters believed they were hearing (and were meant to hear).
One of the political uses of rhetoric is to persuade followers that you
believe what they do without locking yourself down.
His appointments match the evolving realities. On the financial
bailout, Obama has not at all challenged the general strategy of
Paulson and Bernanke, and therefore of the Bush administration. Obama’s
position on Iraq has fairly well merged with the pending Status of
Forces Agreement in Iraq. On Afghanistan, Central Command chief Gen.
David Petraeus has suggested negotiations with the Taliban — while, in
moves that would not have been made unless they were in accord with
Bush administration policies, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has offered
to talk with Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and the Saudis reportedly have offered him asylum. Tensions with Iran have declined, and the Israelis have even said they would not object to negotiations with Tehran.
What were radical positions in the opening days of Obama’s campaign
have become consensus positions. That means he is not entering the
White House in a combat posture, facing a disciplined opposition
waiting to bring him down. Rather, his most important positions have
become, if not noncontroversial, then certainly not as controversial as
they once were.
Instead, the most important issue facing Obama is one on which he
really had no position during his campaign: how to deal with the
economic crisis. His solution, which has begun to emerge over the last
two weeks, is a massive stimulus package
as an addition — not an alternative — to the financial bailout the Bush
administration crafted. This new stimulus package is not intended to
deal with the financial crisis but with the recession, and it is a
classic Democratic strategy designed to generate economic activity
through federal programs. What is not clear is where this leaves
Obama’s tax policy. We suspect, some recent suggestions by his aides not
withstanding,
that he will have a tax cut for middle- and lower-income individuals
while increasing tax rates on higher income brackets in order to try to
limit deficits.
What is fascinating to see is how the policies Obama advocated
during the campaign have become relatively unimportant, while the
issues he will have to deal with as president really were not discussed
in the campaign until September, and then without any clear insight as
to his intentions. One point we have made repeatedly is that a presidential candidate’s positions during a campaign matter relatively little,
because there is only a minimal connection between the issues a
president thinks he will face in office and the ones that he actually
has to deal with. George W. Bush thought he would be dealing primarily
with domestic politics, but his presidency turned out to be all about
the U.S.-jihadist war, something he never anticipated. Obama began his
campaign by strongly opposing the Iraq war — something that has now be
come far less important than the financial crisis, which he didn’t
anticipate dealing with at all.
So, regardless of what Obama might have thought his presidency would look like, it is being shaped not by his wishes, but by his response to external factors.
He must increase his political base — and he will do that by reassuring
skeptical Democrats that he can work with Hillary Clinton, and by
showing soft McCain supporters that he is not as radical as they
thought. Each of Obama’s appointments is designed to increase his base
of political support, because he has little choice if he wants to
accomplish anything else.
As for policies, they come and go. As George W. Bush demonstrated,
an inflexible president is a failed president. He can call it
principle, but if his principles result in failure, he will be judged
by his failure and not by his principles. Obama has clearly learned
this lesson. He understands that a president can’t pursue his
principles if he has lost the ability to govern. To keep that ability,
he must build his coalition. Then he must deal with the unexpected. And
later, if he is lucky, he can return to his principles, if there is
time for it, and if those principles have any relevance to what is
going on around him. History makes presidents. Presidents rarely make
history.

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