Nineteen months into his administration, it makes sense to take stock of the job President Obama has done. Probably the fairest yardstick by which to evaluate presidential achievement is to judge action against promises. Has the president delivered on the pledges he made during the campaign? To be sure, the administration is still working on many issues Obama discussed in 2008. But I think a preliminary analysis is now appropriate.
On the little things, the line items and policy nuggets wonks love, the record is quite good. According to those who track Obama’s performance closely — for instance, Politifact, The Washington Post, and National Journal through its “Promise Audit” — the president has kept about five times more promises than he has broken. He also has begun work on a lengthy list of additional obligations.
But most of this is low-hanging fruit, the small and easy items enacted unilaterally, by executive order or White House directive. On a lot of the important things the president has been less faithful. Obama persuaded Congress to pass a massive $800 billion stimulus bill and historic and wide-sweeping health care and financial regulatory reform. It is interesting, however, that many of the important details did not pass his lips before the election. In this, the president did not really break promises. He just did not warn us what was to come.
When he discussed “change” in 2008, Obama was talking about politics as much as policy. The goal was to bring about a new kind of Washington — one that was accessible, transparent, responsive, and devoid of partisanship. It is clear this has not happened.
Incremental improvements have been made. Obama has banned executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists and he has leaned on Congress to reduce earmarking — the practice directing federal funds to a member’s district rather than subjecting funding to bidding and other merit-based evaluation — dramatically.
There is much to do, however. The executive branch hardly is more transparent, even though the president essentially agreed to put its entire inner workings — contractor databases, bill texts, agency meetings with lobbyists, and the minutiae of federal spending — on the Web. It also is as powerful. The complicated health care and financial regulation laws allow a great deal of future policy on these issues to be written within obscure and opaque agencies.
The broad contours of American politics remain the same. Obama came to the White House promising a post-partisan era in which national interest transcended party interest and individuals from both sides of the aisle would come together to solve the country’s tough problems in pragmatic fashion. This clearly has not happened.
With the possible exception of education policy, this has been a conventional left-of-center regime. Robert Gates was kept on at Defense and another Republican, Ray LaHood from Obama’s home state of Illinois, was made Transportation secretary. But party polarization in the nation’s capital is as great ever — you can count the number of Republicans who voted for the stimulus, health care, and financial regulatory reform on the fingers of one hand. Partisanship was intense before Obama was even an Illinois state senator, but suggesting he miraculously could heal Washington’s ills was outright disingenuous.
Another big theme of the Obama campaign was that he would reduce the size of government — on the campaign trail he repeatedly promised to cut the deficit. This was either a prevarication (lie is such an ugly word) or Obama badly misjudged the depth of the recession. It might have been the former; indeed the promise-trackers largely agree Obama’s campaign pledges meant about an additional $240 billion of discretionary spending in his first year. On Meet the Press in July, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was still arguing current spending constituted a smaller proportion of GDP than that of the Bush years.
Obama displayed worrying naivete if he thought he could spend and cut the deficit in this economy. He also could have chosen different policies than the poorly designed ones settled on by his staff and the congressional Democratic leadership.
Although Obama fortuitously enjoys the luxury of extraordinarily low interest rates, his approach has not generated economic growth because businesses faces an uncertain and unfriendly regulatory environment, the effects of the stimulus were projected too far out into the future, and investors are losing sleep over the country’s fiscal health.
The first 40 percent of the Obama administration has been quite unpredictable. Still, at least the president makes life interesting. Who knows what the future debates over tax cuts, immigration, and environmental policy will bring.
Andy Taylor is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science in the School of Public and International Affairs at N.C. State University.