Man Friday
Obama's 'Naked'
Moment
02.06.09, 12:01 AM ET
Every so often a president finds himself standing completely exposed--naked, so to speak--before the political class.
This first happened to George W. Bush in October 2005, when Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. In Miers, the chief executive had chosen neither a lawyer of intellectual distinction nor a reliable conservative. As she began making courtesy calls on members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, word began leaking from the offices of astonished senators that her purchase on even the most basic constitutional case law proved tenuous.
Opposition to Miers mounted. No less a figure that Judge Robert Bork denounced the nomination as "a disaster on every level." Less than a month after putting Miers' name forward, Bush withdrew her nomination.
Before the Miers episode, even Bush's sharpest critics in Washington had to grant that he was a canny politician. After the Miers episode, even Bush's most zealous supporters in town had to grant that the chief executive was capable of action even when he had no earthly idea what he was doing.
President Bush's moment of nakedness took place more than four years and eight months into his administration. In office less than three weeks, President Obama has already provided a naked moment of his own.
The episode, of course, concerns the legislation now referred to only laughingly as an "economic stimulus." Drafted by the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives, the bill represents a sham and an outrage. Of the more than $800 billion in spending that the legislation authorizes, less than $100 billion would go to highways, the electricity grid or destinations that might--might--produce genuine economic growth. The rest? Transfer payments to interest groups. More than half the "emergency" spending would not even take place until fiscal year 2010.
Making its way through the House last week, the legislation proved so bad that it galvanized the most woe-begotten and demoralized group in the capital, the Republicans. Every last Republican in the House voted against it.
As the legislation was being considered in the Senate this past week, public support for the measure dropped, according to a Rasmussen poll, to a mere 37%--and fully half of all respondents told pollsters they expected the measure to make the economy worse. Moderate Republicans in the Senate, such as Susan Collins of Maine, proposed dramatic reductions in the measure's spending provisions. Conservative Senate Republicans, such as Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, have proposed rewriting the legislation altogether, replacing the spending provisions with tax cuts. Their slogan? "Twice the jobs at half the price."
President Obama, so recently triumphant, is now reeling.
As Washington observers recognize, this entire debacle became predictable the moment the then president-elect decided to permit the House leadership to draft his stimulus legislation. While Obama was behaving like a professor, holding seminars with economists Lawrence Summers, Paul Volcker and Christina Romer, Democrats in the House were behaving like politicians, using Obama's call for a stimulus as cover for forking over tens of billions of dollars to Democratic interest groups.
You didn't even have to be a practicing politician to see what would happen. Even an intellectual like Obama himself ought to have been able to figure it out--any intellectual, that is, who had bothered to read the work of Nobel laureate James Buchanan. As Buchanan long ago noticed, economists who support Keynesian spending programs in theory tend to overlook the self-interested behavior of the politicians who must spend all the money in practice.
Permit House Democrats to draft his stimulus legislation? What could Obama have been thinking? Only one answer fits: Obama wasn't thinking.
After the Harriet Miers debacle, Bush quickly recovered the support of Washington Republicans. He nominated Samuel Alito in Miers' place and then returned to his other duties as chief executive. That was that. Nobody ever had Bush figured for a brilliant mind anyway.
In recovering from the stimulus debacle, Obama is unlikely to prove quite so lucky. A brilliant mind is exactly what Obama's supporters in Washington thought he had. Brilliance defined Obama. Brilliance is what Obama was all about. Now we know that he has already made some dumb mistakes.
The glee among Republicans right now is only to be expected. The long faces among Obama's startled supporters in Washington are a lot more telling.
Peter Robinson, a research
fellow at the Hoover Institution and contributor to
RobinsonandLong.com,
writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.