The day after the 2006 congressional election, George W Bush admitted Republicans had received a “thumping”. President Barack Obama called his 2010 humiliation at the hands of the Tea Party a “shellacking”. Another noun may be called for after Republicans regain control of the US Senate. People assume Obama will then face two long years of lame duckery before he is finally put out of his misery. Yet with fresh blood, and a new approach, the final quarter of a presidency can also become its redemption. Obama should take a leaf from George W Bush’s book.
The president has spent much of the past six years defining his administration against that of his predecessor. Bush launched a misguided war of choice in Iraq, mishandled the one of necessity in Afghanistan, passed generous tax cuts for the wealthy at a time of falling blue-collar incomes and questioned the notion of man-made global warming. But when Bush was bloodied by US voters in 2006, it appeared to knock sense into him. He embarked on a course correction that went some way towards retrieving his presidency.
At its heart was a change of personnel. The day after Democrats regained control of Capitol Hill, Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld, his pugnacious Pentagon chief, and brought in Robert Gates. This proved a big improvement. Gates handled a successful US troop surge in Iraq and restored relations with “old Europe”. A few months before the midterm disaster, Bush had replaced John Snow, the beleaguered Treasury secretary, with Hank Paulson, who became the president’s most pivotal cabinet member. Paulson helped to launch the Group of 20 leading industrial nations, declared global warming to be real and was central to the disaster management after Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.
Perhaps the most critical change had been to elevate Joshua Bolten, an effective political manager, as White House chief of staff a few months before. Bolten helped restore lines of authority to the Oval Office after Dick Cheney, the vice-president, had spent years circumventing normal channels. Karl Rove, who was Bush’s controversial chief strategist — “T*** Blossom”, as he was sometimes nicknamed — was also sidelined. Bush’s administration finally began to function properly.
Obama might also study Ronald Reagan’s final two years after his midterm setback in 1986. Most people thought Reagan was a dead duck. Like Bush, Reagan’s renaissance hinged on finding a new chief of staff, Howard Baker, who had the authority to shake up a besieged White House — and did so effectively. Against the odds, Reagan emerged largely unscathed from the Iran-Contra scandal, passed an immigration reform bill, hit it off with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and left office with high ratings.
Could Obama do the same? Not unless he radically changes the way his White House is run. When he took office in 2009, Obama said he was aiming for an Abraham Lincoln-style “team of rivals”, as depicted in the best-selling book of that name. On the surface, that is what he did by making Hillary Clinton secretary of state and keeping Gates at the Pentagon. In practice, however, Obama’s White House has always been run by a small coterie of insiders, chosen for their loyalty rather than experience. Instead of picking skills that made up for those he lacked, Obama built an inner sanctum around them.
The “team of loyalists” model has been even truer of Obama’s second term, so far, than it was of his first. The president runs the most centralised administration in memory. Yet his ability to shape events in Washington and beyond is severely limited by his reluctance to delegate authority. At the inner circle’s core is Valerie Jarrett, a White House senior adviser as well as close friend to both the president and the first lady. Jarrett is the protector of the Obama flame. Disaffected aides dubbed her the “night stalker”, as there have been occasions when decisions supposedly taken in the day have been unpicked by Jarrett after hours.
Former insiders say it is unlikely Jarrett will return to Chicago until Obama has left office. They add that nothing is likely to change unless she does. In addition to Jarrett, there is Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff. McDonough is central to everything Obama does on foreign and domestic fronts. There is also Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser. Like McDonough, she has been with Obama since the start. Each is talented and decent. Yet there is a limit to what loyalty will buy you.
Many in Washington believe Obama has already checked out of the job. As David Rothkopf, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, puts it, Obama is not so much the “decider” — as Bush described himself — as the “presider”. With a reset, Obama could still achieve a lot in the next two years. Big trade deals with Europe and the Pacific spring to mind. As does immigration reform and a nuclear deal with Iran. But he will need to change the way his White House does business. To carry on as he is now would be to invite irrelevance. On this, if little else, Obama should try to emulate George W Bush.
— Financial Times
