Last week, which ended off Obama’s first month in office, showed what his programs will look like for the next two years at least, just as the previous week had set the tone the Republicans will take for that same period. First off, his programs are found unsatisfactory by everyone until they try to find plausible and politically palatable alternatives. His programs pass everyone’s muster (except that of the die-hard Republicans) precisely because they are tinkered together, combinations of technical ploys rather than some far reaching new idea such as was frequently presented by the New Deal. Rather than closing the banks and making deposit insurance depend on the extent of the capital reserves banks would have to hold, which was FDR’s expedient, Obama merely requires the banks to stand subject to strict audits to assess whether they can remain independent or be taken over by the federal government, at least for a while, while it supplies capital for them to continue. In similar fashion, there is no mortgage reconstruction agency, dedicated to buying bad mortgages (a suggestion I made a few years ago) but rather there is an attempt to coax banks to renegotiate mortgages by having the government pick up some of the tab, and even that draws the contempt of Wall Street.

There is not a campaign slogan in a carton of programs. Obama is depending on the programs to work, and that is what is going to get the Democratic Congress reelected in 2010 and himself reelected two years later. Yet he gets no credit for being so statesman-like, because we quite properly associate statesmanship with showmanship: the dramatic presentation of new programs that, in a phrase, sell themselves, and also the one who is selling them. Bill Clinton nudged Obama, this past week, to display more showmanship, but nobody any longer gives Bill Clinton credit for knowing what he is talking about, even though he almost always does. Showmanship is how FDR and Reagan did it and how Clinton tried to do it, failing at health care, and failing at welfare reform, as he had originally conceived of that, and winning only at economic expansion programs that died when he left office.

There is a second sense of what the Obama years are to be like that is also settling in. Obama moves quickly, in sharp contrast to Bush, who moved molasses slow, however bad the crisis, or however much moving quickly was a requirement for success. Bush allowed Rumsfeld to prolong the Iraq War so that it is still not over even though the signs that a change of course was needed were clear within a week of taking over Baghdad. Bush allowed Brownie to handle Katrina and even afterwards didn’t insist that the Army get moving fast to bring aid to the Superdome and the rest of the city. Paulson delayed action on the sub-prime mortgage crisis until it had become a general financial crisis that still threatens to overwhelm the American financial system. What is remarkable about the Obama Administration is that we are seeing a pace for governmentally initiated events that is as quick as anything since the Johnson Administration, when Johnson signed as many bills as he could, not knowing when the moment would pass. What we might have seen under McCain was much diddling while Wall Street burned.

Obama may not have discovered the magic bullet, but he is certainly trying to treat the patient before the patient bleeds to death. Look at his initiatives. There is a stimulus package he got through a virtually split Senate within a month of taking office. There is a plan to rescue mortgage holders based on money approved before he took office when he got the Congress to approve the second half of the bailout money. Good idea that he got them to give him a blank check for 350 billion dollars; he could never have gotten that money after the war over the stimulus package. For a while (a few weeks?) he is going to have to do without new Congressional action. Again using already established and funded executive authority, he got the Federal Reserve to put in place a plan to stabilize the banks. He has yet to move on the regulation of the credit industry or on health care, but his address to Congress this coming week is, according to reports, going to outline a budget approach that will cut the yearly deficit in half by the end of his first term.  

In addition to that, Obama has provided advance notice that the automobile industry will have to be significantly restructured, and that may involve bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler, something that a few months ago would have required a major sell to the American people that was bound to create political opposition, Obama holding the bag for the failure of the auto industry, when now it looks like the common sense of the moment, Obama doing what everyone (except knee jerk Republicans) thinks has to be done. The same with the partial nationalization of the banks: the policy becomes inevitable before the policy has to be announced. Obama is, early out of the box, masterful at timing and managing public discussion so that when he finally announces his own position, it seems a foregone conclusion, and there is more a sigh of relief than a rush to the barricades of opposition. 

Nor has Obama been silent on foreign policy. Again, his initiatives have not been announced in a way to make them off putting; you have to notice that they are a departure from the policies of the past administration. Hillary delivered a shot across the bow to the North Koreans by announcing it to be an unstable government; Obama made noises about improved relations with Iran; Holbrooke made clear that he was interested in a regional deal to tie together the fortunes of Afghanistan, India and Pakistan (largely so as to give him some leverage over Pakistan). There were carefully orchestrated Congressional visits to Gaza, and that might give Mitchell a carrot to add to his negotiating strategy.

And domestic theatrics have not been neglected. Eric Holder releases some of the pent up anger that Obama could not very well reveal on the campaign trail, even though Holder’s remarks were out of sync with the still reigning after glow of the Obama election. The nation was not so cowardly that it would refuse to elect an African American President. Who cares is people still self-segregate for lunch? Such informal relations are always lagging indicators. What matters is that there is a Black President and that there are Black corporate executives. Holder would have been better off pointing out that the nation has only one elected Black governor.

Questions about Obama’s judgment, whether he has not gone far enough with his initiatives to deal with the banking industry or the auto companies or mortgages, or to open up the credit markets, are really questions about the pace of legislation. If he has not fashioned his legislation just right, it is presumed, he will be stuck with whatever passes Congress and so he can’t err on the side of doing too little. That is true only if he can’t goose Congress into doing more and more as time goes on, they getting used to the idea that one way or another he is going to get something through that will polish what had come before. Is time on the side of the stick in the mud Republicans, or on the side of the Progressive forces? Will it become easier to get bills through or will he run into a wall? As the pundits say, time will tell.

I err, as usual, on the optimistic side. I think the country will become used to a quickened pace and expect Congress to act in accord with that, passing new acts to perfect older ones as well as to take on the big initiatives, such as health care, and to address the issues raised by the radical restructuring of the auto industry that has been signaled by the unwillingness of Administration spokespeople to rule out the idea that a new plan for autos might well include a structured bankruptcy. Then it would be up to Congress to fail to pass legislation and it would then be the branch of government most likely to have assigned to it responsibility for the garage sale dissolution of the American auto industry. Obama is very good at putting the ball in the opposite court. He will have to sustain the volley and, to mix the sports metaphor, pick up the stroke.