WASHINGTON — It is a quick, sweet victory for the new president, and potentially a historic one. The question now is whether the $789 billion economic stimulus plan agreed to by Congressional leaders on Wednesday is the opening act for a more ambitious domestic agenda from President Obama or a harbinger of reduced expectations.
Both the substance of his first big legislative accomplishment and the way he achieved it underscored the scale of the challenges facing the nation and how different a political climate this is from the early stages of recent administrations.
While it hammered home the reality of bigger, more activist government, the economic package was not the culmination of a hard-fought ideological drive, like Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights and Great Society programs, or Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, but rather a necessary and hastily patched-together response to an immediate and increasingly dire situation. On the domestic issues Mr. Obama ran and won on — health care, education, climate change, rebalancing the distribution of wealth — the legislation does little more than promise there will be more to come.
In cobbling together a plan that could get through both the House and the Senate, Mr. Obama prevailed, but not in the way he had hoped. His inability to win over more than a handful of Republicans amounted to a loss of innocence, a reminder that his high-minded calls for change in the practice of governance had been ground up in a matter of weeks by entrenched forces of partisanship and deep, principled differences between left and right.
In the end, Congress did not come together to address what Mr. Obama has regularly suggested is a crisis that could rival the Great Depression. What consensus has been forged so far is likely to be tested in the months to come as he faces scrutiny over the effectiveness of the stimulus package and the likelihood that he will have to ask Congress for substantially more money to heal the fractures in the financial system.
So this was hardly a moment for cigars.
If this is the 21st-century version of Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s 100 Days, Mr. Obama seems to be pursuing it more as an urgent but imposed necessity than as a self-selected mission.
While he has deployed his political capital freely to win approval of the package and to begin pushing his version of a financial-system rescue, he has left little doubt that he is eager to move on to the rest of his domestic agenda. At his news conference on Monday night, Mr. Obama said with a hint of exasperation that a costly economic rescue package “wasn’t how I envisioned my presidency beginning.” Regardless of the government’s budgetary straits, Mr. Obama has signaled that he sees his other signature initiatives not just as salvageable but as more urgent than ever.
Yet since Election Night, when he warned of “setbacks and false starts” and called for “a new spirit of sacrifice,” he has assiduously managed the politics of the moment with an eye toward tempering expectations and limiting the risk to himself and his party.
In his own telling, the legislation Congress is about to send him is imperfect and may not work. His political standing, he suggested to an audience in Florida on Tuesday, could tumble if voters do not see results in the next two years.
It is a sharp and calculated shift from the expansive promises, explicit and implied, that carried him to the White House.
“He has been very consistent, really since the night of his election victory, that it took a long time to get into this and it will take a long time to get out of it,” said William Galston, a domestic policy aide in the Clinton White House who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research organization. “And there’s some evidence that the American people are prepared to be patient.”
But Mr. Galston said Mr. Obama may not yet have fully absorbed the difficulties he faces in pressing for expensive policy initiatives to make health care more affordable and accessible, address global warming, provide more money for education and promote research into alternative energy sources.
“The president hasn’t done as good a job of preparing the nation for the tradeoffs necessary to reconcile the hope agenda with the fear agenda,” Mr. Galston said. “I’d be surprised if a Congress still reeling from sticker shock in terms of the stimulus and the financial rescue are willing to pony up for a full-bore reform of the health system.”
David Winston, a Republican pollster, said that whatever big goals Mr. Obama and the base of the Democratic Party remain eager to achieve, voters for the most part are going to be focused on one thing: whether the economic measures sponsored by the new administration prove effective in halting and reversing job losses.
“He’s going to have to fit other issues into the larger narrative of the economy,” Mr. Winston said.
Mr. Obama has long since begun trying to do just that. He has been framing rising health care costs not just as a social issue, but as one affecting the viability of American industry. Cleaning up the environment and weaning the economy from its dependence on oil are opportunities to create new, well-compensated jobs. Education is an investment in the economy’s long-term competitiveness.
But those assertions will run up against a variety of countervailing forces: a rapidly rising national debt, a strain of populist anger, a smaller but energized Republican minority and divisions among Democrats about priorities, to name a few. Getting past them promises to be as tricky for Mr. Obama as was this first victory.
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