Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 22)

The Clintonites’ Beef With Obama It’s not his policies they complain about but his messaging. Is that fair? By Simon van Zuylen-Wood adviser, was harsher. “His apparent inability to turn his communication skills as a campaigner [into] campaign skills as a sitting president is his single biggest failure.” Added another official, who worked in both White Houses, “Obama ran a campaign that was about selling not a vision of government, but a vision of himself.” Four years later, he’s still not “campaigning on what he’s accomplished and what he’s done.” “ ully pulpit” is an awfully broad term. William Safire, in his indispensable Political Dictionary, defined it as the “active use of the presidency’s prestige and high visibility to inspire or moralize.” That meaning is consonant with the Clintonite critique, but it doesn’t completely do it justice. Lurking beneath the chronic gripe that Obama failed to “pivot” from his post-partisan campaign motif to a hard-boiled governing theme are hints that 44 simply lacks 42’s leadership mojo. The official who worked in both administrations has a pet example. When the stimulus was passed in early 2009, only one member of the president’s inner sanctum—Vice President Joe Biden—was tasked with promoting it. Meanwhile, Obama was pitching health care and green jobs; economic advisers Christina Romer and Larry Summers were privately gaming out the bill’s bigpicture effects; Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was doing damage control on the bank bailout; and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orzsag was worried about deficit reduction. “The core to being an executive—what are the big problems—is focusing on a theme,” the official said. “Clinton was very disciplined about that,” he added, pointing out that staffers woke up each morning expecting to promote a “message of the day.” Others in the Clinton camp seized on that crippling scourge—insufficient executive experience—to make a slightly different point; Obama needed to reassure an anxious electorate not by talking a big game, but through a series of more symbolic, piecemeal, moves. One former speechwriter (fondly) recalls Clin- B I t’s April 2010, and an exploded BP rig is hemorrhaging oil into the Gulf of Mexico. President Bill Clinton, racing to the scene, leaps into the ocean “in a wet suit, trying to plug the leak personally.” This half-serious whimsy, which appears in Ed Rendell’s latest book, A Nation of Wusses, is as much Clinton worship as it is Obama criticism; Barack Obama’s “substantive response [to the spill] had been right on target in every way,” writes the former Pennsylvania governor and staunch “How many Americans know that more than 40 percent of the stimulus spending was for tax cuts?” writes Ed Rendell, former Pennsylvania governor and staunch Clinton ally. “Hardly any, because it was never explained to them.” Clinton ally. “But [the] president hadn’t been visible enough down in the Gulf.” Rendell’s dig is a curious inversion of a recurrent right-wing attack: Obama, Rendell suggests, is all substance and no style. It’s also emblematic of a broader Clintonite critique of the president, one that has as much to do with well-intentioned frustration as with rose-tinted 1990s nostalgia. This critique should not be confused with other popular left-leaning attacks on the president. It bears no relation, for instance, to the progressive charge that Obama didn’t push for a bigger econom22 September/October 2012 ic stimulus bill, or hard enough for a public option, and that he caved to the banks in negotiating the bailout and the subsequent financial reform legislation. Nor would you hear it from centrist exClinton strategists like Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, who decry the current president’s “divisive” policies on Fox News. Instead, Rendell—along with a halfdozen former Clinton officials I spoke to—agree with Obama’s policies, but argue that he’s failed to use the presidential bully pulpit to sell them to the public. According to Rendell, Obama let t he G OP d e f i ne down his foremost legislative achievements—health care re for m a nd t he stimulus—and paid the price in the 2010 midterm elections. “How many Americans know that more than 40 percent of the stimulus spending was for tax cuts?” Rendell writes. “Hardly any, because it was never explained to them.” It’s a refrain I heard often. “There has been, among the Clinton people, a concern that [Obama] hasn’t been consistently effective at the bully pulpit,” one former member of Clinton’s senior staff told me. “Clinton has a unique ability to infuse policy arguments with real passion. And that energy has at times been lacking in this president.” Bill Galston, a Brookings scholar and former Clinton

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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