Hillarysworld

It started out like a song ... we knew we had a good thing going. And if I wanted too much, was that such a mistake?

President Barack Obama’s answer to composer Stephen Sondheim’s question would be “yes”, were he the sort who readily admits error — which he most definitely is not.

We are six months into the Obama reign, and he did have a good thing going until very recently. He pushed through what voters thought was a stimulus bill. He held numerous press conferences at which an adoring media allowed him to display his rhetorical skills — no mumbling George W Bush, he. He toured the world, to the applause of adoring masses from London to Paris to Cairo. He tackled perceived global warming by urging Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill aimed at showing he could lead the way to a cooler, greener world. He bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, rewarding the United Auto Workers for delivering key states to him in last year’s election.

Then he did what Sondheim warned of — he “wanted too much” — and Congress went into recess without passing the president’s so-called reform of the nation’s healthcare industry, a $1 trillion (£600 billion) restructuring that would turn effective control of one-sixth of the American economy over to government bureaucrats. Too many congressmen learnt that almost 90% of Americans are satisfied with their healthcare, that a majority of voters think the deficit is already the nation’s biggest worry, and that 42% of Americans think the Obama plan is a bad idea, and only 36% that it is a good idea (22% have no opinion).

It is too early to say that the presidential agenda is dead in the water. But it is not too early to say that he made some serious errors. The stimulus not only failed to keep the unemployment rate to 8%, as Obama promised (it is now 9.5%). It also unleashed a flood of red ink that shifted voters’ attention to the dire implications of the deficit for their children’s and grandchildren’s standard of living. So when the president insisted that Congress pass a cap-and-trade programme that would drive up energy costs, and a healthcare plan that would add more than $1 trillion to the deficit or the tax burden over the next decade, Congress heard from unhappy constituents, and momentum shifted from the president to more centrist Democrats.

It is important to remember that it is not Republicans who have thrown a spanner into Obamacare. The president has a 78-seat majority in the House of Representatives, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. He does not need a single Republican vote to pass any bill he sends to Congress. But the Democratic leadership in both houses is far to the left of centrist Democrats from marginal, conservative districts. These centrists’ unwillingness to risk their political lives by supporting Obama and the party’s left will inevitably slow the president’s efforts to “transform” (his word) the American economy.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article6735991.ece