Obama's flag flying high again

A week is a long time in politics" is one of Washington's oldest axioms. If ever there was a time that proved the truth of that statement it was the middle of last month. After January's unexpected Republican victory in the special election to fill the Massachusetts senate seat left vacant by Edward Kennedy's death, one thing America's political class appeared to agree on was that President Barack Obama's ambitious plans for health care reform were dead. With them, it was widely assumed, died any real chance that Obama might live up to the hopes so many people in the United States and around the world had invested in him barely one year earlier.

A week or two after the Massachusetts vote, Jon Stewart, arguably the country's most influential political comedian, appeared on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News talk show. Discussing Obama's political woes, the famously liberal Stewart told the belligerently conservative O'Reilly: "I'm torn. For me, I can't tell if (Obama is) a Jedi Master, playing chess on a three-levelled board way ahead of us, or this is just kicking his a**."

As recently as mid-March that remained the conventional wisdom. Then, in the course of a week, Democrats went from gloom and angst to celebrating the passage of sweeping health care reform. Obama, suddenly, was hailed as a political genius.

The final product of America's year-long health care debate is not nearly as liberal as many of the party's most loyal supporters would have preferred but it is still the most far-reaching piece of social legislation to be signed into law in America in more than 40 years.

It was also liberal enough to get conservatives, both in and out of Congress, apoplectic with rage and leave them warning Democrats of dire retribution when Americans go to the polls in November's mid-term elections.

Thus did Obama go, in the space of a few days, from weathering unfavourable comparisons with Jimmy Carter to basking in praise of his toughness and legislative skill.

The lesson? A week is still a long time in politics. Also, many people who work in politics (or cover it for the media) have short memories; and America's political class (again, the media especially) remains prone to hyperbole.

Because while the hopes and dreams invested in the newly elected Obama of 2008 were unrealistic to the point of absurdity, so too are the political obituaries that have been written of his administration every few months since he took office.

Perhaps the most apt metaphors for this still-young presidency come from the world of sports, specifically basketball. This is especially apt since Obama is widely understood to be a genuine sports fan. All male American politicians feign a certain interest in sports but Obama, in interviews and TV appearances stretching back to his earliest days on the national stage, has repeatedly demonstrated a genuine fan's grasp of baseball, American football and, especially, basketball.

In several accounts of the 2008 campaign Obama is reported to have reassured associates during especially bleak moments that while he might sometimes seem to lack momentum, like a star basketball player, he knew how to "bring it" in the game's final stretch.

Basketball games are often tedious affairs. The two teams go back and forth — one team runs for a few seconds, shoots and scores two or three points. The other team then gets possession of the ball and does exactly the same thing, moving in the opposite direction. This continues at a leisurely pace for around two hours until, with a minute or two remaining on the clock, the game suddenly transforms into a hard charging test of both physical and tactical skill.

It is at this moment, with the game on the line, that star players are expected to prove their worth by playing at a higher level. Michael Jordan was not the greatest player in his sport because he played better than everyone else all the time. He was the greatest because in those final few seconds he could seemingly flip an internal switch and suddenly become transcendently better than anyone else on the court.

The president's detractors tend to see him as aloof and self-important and the basketball motif is likely to reinforce that opinion. In many respects, however, the metaphor fits.

Throughout his 14 months in office Barack Obama has seemed to be at once everywhere and nowhere. He is interviewed on television with a frequency — and sometimes in venues — that would stun most of his predecessors. Yet on the two largest policy issues to confront his presidency so far — health care and the stimulus Bill approved by Congress during his first weeks in office — he often seemed to hold himself apart from much of the politicking, moving in only at the end to close the deal.

To say this, of course, is to accept image as reality. Anyone who knows Washington knows that the absence of public presidential events on a particular issue does not mean that the president and his enormous White House staff are not deeply involved in things behind the scenes.

And what, then, does the Obama White House have to show for all of that involvement? If we acknowledge that unrealistic expectations were invested in the Obama presidency at its outset, has the subsequent letdown been justified? Or has that, too, become a study in overcompensation?

The administration has significant accomplishments to which it can point: most recently the health care overhaul. This followed the $787-billion economic stimulus package passed during Obama's first weeks in office.

The success or failure of health reform is much too far in the future for anyone to judge today. While some of the Bill's measures took effect immediately, others will not take hold for many months. Some of the most important parts of the Bill do not come into force for many years (a tax on the most expensive employer-provided health plans, for example, only takes hold in 2018).

The stimulus Bill is a different story. A fancy US government website (www.recovery.gov) attempts to make the case that the funds are doing good and saving jobs in communities across the nation. Any American visiting the site can enter their postal code and immediately see a map of their community, covered in dots that represent stimulus expenditures. Click on a dot and you see how much money has been spent, who received it and how many jobs the project saved or created.

Republicans dismiss much of this, alleging that the site's data is wrong, overstated or both. Some have called for the programme to cease so that as-yet unspent stimulus funds can be returned to the Treasury.

Democrats reply that disbursing the money over several years was always the plan. There is also the argument that, whatever its shortcomings, the stimulus Bill kept the world's most important economy from plunging over a cliff in the early months of last year and that alone has to count for something.

Between the bookends of stimulus and health care, Obama has also given consumers new protections related to their credit cards, won passage for a jobs Bill (albeit a relatively modest one) and signed legislation making it easier for women who have experienced discrimination in the workplace to sue their employers.

Appended to the health care legislation in its final stages was a Bill making sweeping changes to the way America helps students pay for their university education — a Bill that promises both to reduce the federal deficit and to make billions more in loans available to America's students.

Even leaving aside health care — a huge achievement by any measure — this is a pretty respectable record for any new president's first 14 months in office.

What it does not do, of course, is alter the American political landscape in some immediate, unmistakable way. While some people clearly hoped for (or feared) this in the days leading up to Obama's inauguration, it was probably inevitable that change, when it came, would be more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Does that make Barack Obama a disappointment? Perhaps even a failure?

No, it makes him what he always was: an American politician. Unusually skilled. Oratorically gifted. Paradigm-shifting, as an African-American. But ultimately, and fundamentally, a politician: a man committed to the business of winning elections, and of governing. That is not nearly as inspiring as a campaign built around "change". In the real world, however, it is how "change" happens.

Gordon Robison teaches political science at the University of Vermont. His opinion column on US politics appears alternate Wednesdays in Gulf News.