The President's recent display of liberalism – and confusion – can only help the opposition, says Janet Daley.
(Daily telegraph).The Republicans now believe they have a grip on what Barack Obama is about. At least for this week. The grip is subject to reappraisal because Mr Obama has developed a gift for reinventing himself with remarkable alacrity. One very senior commentator on the Right said to me, "First we had Candidate Obama, who was a liberal [ie Left wing]. Then we had President-Elect Obama, who was post-partisan and centrist. Now we have President Obama, who has reverted to being ultraliberal."
The question of who Mr Obama really is, and what he truly believes, underlies the growing list of Very Odd Things that seem to be happening under his administration. Among the most perplexing of these mysteries is why, when he went to such pains to assemble a huge and widely experienced team of White House economic advisers (even going to the lengths of parading them at a press conference before he took office) he then handed over the actual drafting of his economic policy to the old Democratic fixers in Congress. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, are now, for all intents and purposes, running the Obama recovery plan.
Barack Obama's Treasury Secretary candidates slammed by liberalsEven if you do not regard the former as a monster and the latter as pretty hopeless, one thing is for sure: bipartisan they are not. So there is nothing very centrist about the budget which they are hoping to push through under the banner of Obama's "change we can believe in". The result: this is a $3.6 trillion Pelosi budget, embodying most of the wish-list of liberal projects that the Left of the Democratic Party has been dreaming of for more than 20 years. Should we assume, then, that this is what Mr Obama always wanted? Or that he is simply out of his depth and being steamrollered by the formidable Democratic machine in Congress?
Most of the Republicans I have spoken to here are inclined to think that this peculiar turn of events can be attributed to Rahm Emanuel, who is Mr Obama's Alastair Campbell. This is partly because they are inclined to think that pretty much everything in the Obama presidency can be attributed to Mr Emanuel, but also because of his revealing comment that "every crisis should be seen as an opportunity". This can be roughly interpreted as, "Never let a good crisis go to waste."
When I met Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, at a Washington breakfast, he expressed the suspicion openly that the Democrats might actually be deliberately avoiding attending to the banking and housing crises because they wanted to prolong the moment in which they could push through their favoured liberal packages (such as health care, and environmental policies) under the cover of an emergency rescue operation. (And who better to bludgeon such measures through Congress than those old Democrat manipulators Pelosi and Reid?)
Another quandary that bemuses the opposition – while it deeply disturbs Mr Obama's supporters – is why the President is having so much trouble staffing his Cabinet team. His Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, may not be sitting in splendid isolation any longer (the administration has finally succeeded in making three Treasury appointments) but there are still 17 unfilled positions in what is arguably the most important government department of the day.
Quite apart from the possibility of embarrassment over past tax and social security payments, are plausible candidates worried about being associated with high-risk White House strategy? Maybe, but given that Mr Obama swept into the White House on a tide of popular approval, surely he should be able to find enough people who are appropriate and willing to serve?
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