Obama’s 2013 hiccups and 2014 opportunity

Sorry to disappoint the gloating vultures eager to feed on Barack Obama’s political corpse, but his fifth year, while rich in embarrassments (NSA and Obamacare rollout to the fore), was far from the worst fifth year of any two term president. Just contrast it with George W. Bush’s.

In November 2004, Bush 43 won the votes of more Americans than any other individual in the history of the Republic. In the course of the next year he presided over the collapse of Iraq into a civil war that killed Iraqi is at a faster rate than even Saddam Hussein had ever managed. New Orleans drowned and thousands died because Bush and his GOP allies running Congress were too sloppy and feckless to maintain funding for the levee system protecting the city from the sea and the Mississippi Delta, a responsibility that had been assumed by federal governments starting with minimum interventionist Calvin Coolidge in 1927.

In 2005 karma finally started catching up with the Bush Wrecking Crew. The following year they unexpectedly lost control of Congress and then of course came the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, potentially the most serious economic crisis to hit the United States since 1929 and the Great Depression.

And let’s not forget the $60 billion Bernie Madoff scam, the worst recorded rip-off of its kind in American history: It would have been nipped in the bud if  “W” and his crew had not taken such tip priority passion in gutting the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Compared to that Obama’s woes in his fifth year were a mild hiccup. The administration still has a year to fix the American Affordable Care web-site before the midterm elections. If enough people are getting medical coverage where they never had it before, or are experiencing an improvement in their coverage (since most of the old “wonderfully cheap” plans were just plain down useless), the media embarrassment of this past fall will be ancient history by then.

The same goes to the NSA embarrassment. The real story behind that one, of course, is that Obama never put the NSA super-surveillance in place in the first place. It had grown over the decades but metastasized after the horror and shocks of 9/11. The hypocrisy of Republicans lining up in outrage about alleged surveillance abuses is like Captain Louis Renault expressing his shock, shock! That c gambling was going on at Rick’s Café Americain in “Casablanca” and then pocketing his own profits from it. (“Your winnings, sir.” “Thank you.”)

The other dirty secret hiding in plain sight is that Barack Obama’s biggest political headaches in 2013 didn’t come because he was a big, bad liberal. They came because he was a cautious centrist who passively implemented the Republican policies and ideas he’d inherited.

Obamacare, after all, is nothing more than Heritagecare or Romneycare. It is the implementation of an idea cooked up by the right wing Heritage Foundation to protect the sacred profits of the big insurance mega-corporations that was implemented before only in tiny Massachusetts by that well-known Marxist radical Mitt Romney. If Obama had had the political guts to go straight for a single payer health plan, he would have suffered no more abuse and calumny than he had to endure anyway. Get a supposedly liberal Democratic president to implement a national universal health care program that was lovingly crafted by the most right wing of Republicans anathema to extending health coverage at all and see what will happen.

But when Obama went head-to-head with his Republican tormentors in Congress over the 17-day government shutdown he won hands–down. Since then, a tamed and chastened GOP House majority has signed on to a deal that takes budgetary showdowns off the table for another two years.

Obama, therefore, has finally learned the lesson that served Harry S. Truman so well in his 1948 election campaign. It pays for an embattled president to blame Congress as the corrupt, selfish Washington Beltway Insiders who are preventing him from bringing eternal peace and prosperity to the American people.

In the past, the president has won difficult confrontations or stuck fast to unpopular but vital decisions, only to stay silent afterwards and let his hard-won victories dissolve in rainwater. As Bill Clinton rightly said, Obama is a president who gets the difficult things right and the easy ones wrong. Will it be any different this time?

Just possibly. John Podesta, the president’s new chief of staff is an old Bill Clinton triangulating centrist who wants to move more to the unapologetic liberal offensive, an oxymoron in recent decades if ever there was one. But he will try and push Barack Obama on to the political offensive, where he has always been more effective. If Obama goes with that flow, unexpected opportunities could open up fast.

George W. Bush’s catastrophic fifth year was followed by a sixth year where the Republicans lost their 12-year control of the House of Representatives. If Obama can maintain economic recovery at home, however slow and avoid foreign policy crisis abroad (Iraq – yet another ghastly Bush II legacy – is the biggest potential threat looming), than his Dems have a chance to regain the House majority they squandered in 2010.

Martin Sieff’s most recent book “That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman’s Flat World Myths are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs” (2012) is available from amazon.com.