By Tim Stanley US politics Last updated: December 31st, 2013
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*** Tim Stanley
Dr Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.
Obama: good at winning elections, but little else.
A suggested New Year's resolution for Barack Obama: try harder. After all, 2013 was not a good year for the President. In fact, it might have been his worst yet.
The litany of failure began with his attempt to pass a modest gun control bill in the wake of the Newtown massacre. The vast majority of Americans were favourable (if probably uninterested), the media backed it and – in the aftermath of that bloody horror – it seemed inevitable. Yet the President couldn't garner the votes. The problem wasn't just the Republicans being mean or the NRA being surprisingly smart, it was that Obama's 2012 victory had come at a price. He'd so slandered, slammed and irritated his opponents that they refused to work with him. And so the lame duck presidency became a dead duck.
Example #2: Syria. Presidents rarely have trouble sending Americans to war. There's a tradition that it's the executive's prerogative and Congress usually defers to the hawks. But on this occasion Obama first said he'd go to the Congress, then declined even to do that, then allowed all talk of war to slide into silence. Again, his nervousness about seeking approval wasn't just down to Republican partisanship (on this occasion, the GOP establishment queued up to back him). It was because Obama had weakened the case for war through incompetence. As I wrote at the time, the President had:
a) refused to do anything in Syria for two years,
b) been goaded by the British and French into action,
c) arbitrarily drawn a "red line" in a press conference,
d) denied drawing said line,
e) asserted his privilege as President to pursue military action,
f) then asked Congress for permission to pursue military action,
g) forced congressional leaders to parade in front of the cameras pledging support,
h) realised at the last minute that he's not got the votes in the House to win a vote, and
i) decided to do basically what Putin always said he should do by returning to the themes of diplomacy and asking Assad nicely to hand over his chemical weapons.
The upshot was that Assad stayed in power and Putin humiliated the West. For the record, most of us never wanted that war in the first place. But it would have been nicer to stay out on a point of humanitarian principle rather than bad policymaking.
Finally, there was Obamacare. This was the most important screw-up of all because it related to the biggest proposal of the first term: universal healthcare coverage. It was promised that people could keep their old insurance plans, that costs would fall, that the system would be easy to navigate. On the contrary, millions risked higher premiums and losing their old plans. And the website – the basic nuts and bolts of the operation – functioned less professionally than a 13-year old's tumblr of cute looking cats. To be fair, many of these problems have been addressed. But the damage is done. Obamacare looks overambitious and poorly conceived.
The net result is that this year Obama's approval rating sunk almost to its lowest ever levels. Yes, nearly every President has a bad second term. Yes, it's often the product of tensions in the first term coming to the boil in the second. But rarely has a presidency been so damned by its own president. He has alienated much of the Congress, run a foreign policy based upon a conscious rejection of world leadership, spent too much, expanded the welfare state, and failed to ensure that his administration is at least functional. Barack Obama, it seems, is very good at winning elections. But not so good at all the hard work that has to be done inbetween them.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, ObamaCare, Syria, tea party, Vladimir Putin
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