Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Obama: The Evolution of a President
    Obama: The Evolution of a President
    Obama: The Evolution of a President
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    Obama: The Evolution of a President

    By The Washington Post

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Barack Obama arrived in Washington in 2008 symbolizing the political change he promised on the campaign trail during his historic presidential victory. But in many ways, Washington changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. This is the story of how the idealist of the 2008 campaign evolved into a hard-nosed pragmatist, shelving his promise of a new kind of politics to fight increasingly partisan budget battles and run a bare-knuckles re-election campaign. Through a series of articles and photographs published by The Washington Post, this book outlines the change in his political personality during his four years in office, and describes his engagement with some of the most challenging issues he confronted during his time in office – and what his approach may mean for a second term should he win in November.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDiversion Books
    Release dateAug 10, 2012
    ISBN9781938120657
    Obama: The Evolution of a President
    Author

    The Washington Post

    The Washington Post has built an unparalleled reputation in its coverage of American politics and related topics. The paper’s circulation, prominence, and influence continue to grow.

    Read more from The Washington Post

    Related to Obama

    Related ebooks

    American Government For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Obama

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Obama - The Washington Post

      Obama: The Evolution of a President

      Copyright

      Diversion Books

      A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

      443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

      New York, New York 10016

      www.DiversionBooks.com

      Copyright © 2012 by The Washington Post

      Cover designed by David Griffin

      Cover image courtesy of Marlina Mara

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

      For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com.

      First Diversion Books edition September 2012.

      ISBN: 978-1-938120-65-7 (ebook)

      INTRODUCTION

      Barack Obama arrived in Washington in 2008 fully confident he could deliver on the change you can believe in rallying cry of his historic presidential campaign.

      In many ways, however, Washington has changed Obama more than Obama has changed Washington.

      The most significant change of the last four years may be the evolution that occurred within Obama himself. The idealist of the 2008 campaign has become a hard-nosed pragmatist after a series of bruising battles with Republicans in Congress. The man who once promised a new kind of politics has become a partisan warrior running a bare-knuckles re-election campaign. It’s a metamorphosis that has cheered many of his most ardent supporters, who long hoped for a stronger advocate for liberal causes. But it has also disillusioned many Americans who believed he could bring the country together and transform Washington into a place where problem solving overcame party politics.

      During his campaign, Obama promised to end the war in Iraq. He pledged to fix the country’s broken health-care system. And in the final weeks of his campaign, he vowed urgently to find the tools to prevent another Great Depression. But more than anything, his aspiration to create a post-partisan politics gave a special lift to his candidacy and created outsize expectations for his presidency.

      The call for change, for a new politics shorn of bitterness and red-blue divisions had long been at the heart of Obama’s political persona. He wove that message into every important speech of the campaign, from his announcement in February 2007 all the way to his inauguration speech. By then, however, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were already at odds over an economic stimulus program. Republicans call the stimulus battle the original sin of the Obama presidency. White House officials mark it as the moment when hope and change collided with Republican intransigence.

      During his first year in office, Obama saw his approval ratings sink and the loss of the Democrats filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority with the triumph of Scott Brown (R) in Massachusetts. But in March 2010, the president managed to rally the troops and pass historic health-care reform legislation expanding coverage to 32 million Americans and outlawing certain insurance company practices like refusing to cover those with preexisting conditions. This is what change looks like, Obama proclaimed post-vote.

      But the president headed into 2010 with several hurdles to implementing his legislative agenda, which included a major financial regulatory reform package and a jobs bill. At the start of that year, he assumed a more populist tone and proposed a spending freeze in his 2011 budget for discretionary spending, along with a tax on big banks to calm public furor over large compensation packages.

      Though those initiatives seemed designed to channel a middle course, they angered the president’s liberal base, which wanted the public option included in the health-care measure. Obama’s left-flank was also irate about a December 2009 decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

      The president paid in the 2010 midterm elections that saw the rise of the tea party and the loss of the House majority to Republicans and the seizing of six Senate seats by the GOP.

      Despite those setbacks, the former community activist and one-term Illinois senator has already ushered in change in a variety of ways: through his race as the nation’s first African-American president, through all the programs launched by his mammoth stimulus bill, through his executive actions on education and immigration and through his potentially revolutionary political tactics that involved reaching out to average citizens through the Internet in unprecedented ways.

      His slow evolution on the propriety of gay marriage led to a significant milestone for gay rights.

      He has been less successful in shepherding change in the Mideast and Iran, but his administration can point to several successes in foreign policy after four years, including the death of Osama Bin Laden.

      But it was his inability to enact transformational change during the debt ceiling negotiations in the summer of 2011 that really changed Obama himself. The actions of Obama and his staff during that period best reflect the grand ambitions and the shortcomings of his entire presidency.

      Like earlier policy battles, the negotiations to keep the country from falling off a fiscal cliff revealed a divided figure, a man who remained aloof from a Congress where he once served and that he now needed. He was caught between his own aspirations for historical significance and his inherent political caution. And he was unable to bridge a political divide that had only grown wider since he took office, underscoring the gulf between the way he campaigned and the way he had governed.

      In the end, that brief effort not only illuminated pitfalls in the road he had taken during the previous three years but also directed him down a different, harder-edged, more overtly partisan path that is now defining his reelection campaign.

      What happened during those days in July when the grand bargain was almost reached, but not quite, changed him for good. He no longer seemed a divided man.

      His goal after that summer was unequivocal: to win a second term.

      PART I

      LONER PRESIDENT

      Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

      (Photo by Toni Sandys/The Washington Post)

      Obama, the loner president

      By Scott Wilson

      October 7, 2011

      Beyond the economy, the wars and the polls, President Obama has a problem: people.

      This president endures with little joy the small talk and back-slapping of retail politics, rarely spends more than a few minutes on a rope line, refuses to coddle even his biggest donors. His relationship with Democrats on Capitol Hill is frosty, to be generous. Personal lobbying on behalf of legislation? He prefers to leave that to Vice President Biden, an old-school political charmer.

      Obama’s circle of close advisers is as small as the cluster of personal friends that predates his presidency. There is no entourage, no Friends of Barack to explain or defend a politician who has confounded many supporters with his cool personality and penchant for compromise.

      Obama is, in short, a political loner who prefers policy over the people who make politics in this country work.

      He likes politics, said a Washington veteran who supports Obama, but like a campaign manager likes politics, not a candidate. The former draws energy from science and strategy, the latter from contact with people.

      Which raises an odd question: Is it possible to be America’s most popular politician and not be very good at American politics?

      Obama’s isolation is increasingly relevant as the 2012 campaign takes shape, because it is pushing him toward a reelection strategy that embraces the narrow-cast politics he once rejected as beneath him. Now he is focused on securing the support of traditional Democratic allies — minorities, gays, young people, seniors, Jews — rather than on making new friends, which was the revolutionary approach he took in 2008, when millions of first-time voters cast their ballots for his promise of change.

      This essay is based on conversations with people inside and outside the White House since March 2009, when I began covering the Obama administration. One of the first things that struck me in those early days was just how much the mythology of that against-the-odds campaign guided the new administration’s approach to governing. The idealism of 2008 infused the White House — as it did a popular president who had relied on new methods of outreach and communication, not on old Washington and its enervating ways, to win.

      In the first two years, the phrase I heard often in the White House was Good policy makes for good politics. Even then, the principle seemed based on a naive reading of a

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1