Only a year ago, the buzzword about Barack Obama was “transformational.” Americans had supposedly elected another Lincoln to the White House; no, another FDR, or maybe a liberal Reagan. Nobody’s talking that way anymore. Obama’s actual achievements so far have been piecemeal at best.
He may be on the brink of signing a health-care reform bill, but it leaves many of his supporters underwhelmed. The economic picture, wrenched by the financial crisis that began in 2008, still looks uncertain, and for the unemployed it looks bleak. The White House has announced a new policy on Afghanistan, but it remains unclear exactly what that policy is, even inside Obama’s own Pentagon.
The President himself has conceded that the country “has every right to be deflated” after his first year. Now that his polling numbers have fallen to Earth — from mid-60% approval a year ago to just below 50% approval today — Obama looks less like a political messiah and more a victim of unrealistic expectations raised, in part, by his own personality-focused election campaign.
In his own first year, Lincoln rallied the Union and took the first halting steps toward emancipation. FDR initiated key programs of the New Deal. Reagan completed the sweeping tax reform that was the cornerstone of his conservative domestic policy. Obama’s presidency is taking longer to get on track. Or maybe it was a mistake all along to project wildly about Obama’s “transformational” presidency before he had served a single day on the job.
Regardless, his performance ought to be held to a less exalted standard. Setting aside the important racial symbolism, Obama’s first year may be most usefully compared with those of two Presidents of the modern era with very different historical standing: John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. Like Obama, Kennedy and Carter were Democrats elected as agents of change after eight years of Republican control of the White House. Like him, they were youthful telegenic favorites of the press corps who promised a break with the tired politics of the past. Although they faced different situations at home and abroad, all three shared certain challenges.
In terms of his accomplishments and achievements, how has Obama fared compared with Kennedy and Carter, both of whom intended to translate bold plans into action — only to run smack into brutal reality?
And, more important, does it look as if the President will go on to succeed from here? Does his first year suggest that he will be like Kennedy, who smartly took responsibility for failures, learned from mistakes and set the stage for a political comeback? Or does Obama’s first year suggest that he will follow Carter in never getting a handle on things and having a presidency that ends abysmally?
On the first test — the achievement test — Obama rates roughly in line with Kennedy and Carter.
Given his party’s margins controlling the Congress and the long “to do” list with which he entered the White House Obama has faced criticism for not accomplishing more. With regard to health care reform in particular, the President’s detractors charge that he ought to have obtained a far more sweeping bill than now seems likely.
Yet both Kennedy and Carter enjoyed even larger Democratic majorities than Obama does — and neither enjoyed smooth sailing in his first year. Kennedy found most of his early agenda, including health-care reform and an aid-to-education bill, hopelessly stalled because so much power on Capitol Hill belonged to conservative senior Democrats. Only after his assassination and the crushing Democratic victories in 1964 did the New Frontier’s domestic hopes bear fruit as Lyndon B. Johnson‘s Great Society.
Carter, for his part, antagonized the Democratic Congress by attempting to cut what he considered wasteful pork-barrel appropriations. Taking energy policy as his signature issue – calling it “the moral equivalent of war” – Carter managed to get an energy bill through the House by the end of his first summer, only to see it get bottled up in the Senate. By the end of the year, Carter’s other domestic priorities, including welfare reform and tax reform, seemed to be going nowhere.
In foreign policy, Obama stands accused of muddling his stance on some crucial positions he took during the campaign, including the internments at Guantanamo and negotiating with the radical leadership in Tehran. In the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama demanded Israel cease all settlements on the West Bank and when rebuked failed to have a Plan B.
Yet Obama has certainly fared better than Kennedy, whose first year consisted of one foreign policy fiasco after another: the Bay of Pigs disaster, a shaky Vienna summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and crisis over the building of the Berlin Wall. By contrast, Carter’s early, slow progress in arms-limitation talks, and partial successes in Middle East diplomacy (resulting in the Camp David accords in 1978), looked almost triumphant. Yet Carter also spent the last day of 1977 in Tehran, where he elaborately toasted the Shah of Iran at a state dinner, and ironically helped set the stage for the foreign policy debacle that would eventually ruin his presidency.
Comparisons with the freshman years of Kennedy and Carter thus offer some solace to Obama.
But now what? As he rounds the bend into year two, this is Obama’s choice: Learn from his missteps, publicly take personal responsibility for them, and correct course like Kennedy or flail like Carter, who ultimately proved unable to master the presidency.
Here’s how Kennedy tacked in the winds of history. By immediately shouldering accountability for the Bay of Pigs invasion – calling himself “the responsible officer of the government” — Kennedy stood tall amid embarrassing defeat. By firing the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Richard Bissell, and replacing him with John McCone, he established firm control of his own intelligence service.
Thus reinforced, and having taken Khrushchev’s measure, Kennedy was able to exercise the cool-headed combination of forcefulness and restraint that saw the world through the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. JFK also came to understand the urgency of civil rights reform and gained enough political momentum to propose and push for the legislation that was enacted after his death.
As a result, Kennedy and his party actually improved their political positions during his second year, enough so that the Democrats sustained only minor losses in the House and actually increased their Senate majority during the midterm elections in 1962.
By contrast, Carter essentially hunkered down — never adequately adapting his approach to dealing with Congress. When his energy reform efforts continued to stall, he appeared to blame the country (in his notorious “malaise” speech) and seemed to panic by summarily demanding resignation letters from his entire cabinet.
In foreign affairs, despite his noble vaunting of human rights, he could never extract himself from the mess caused by the crackup of the geo-political system engineered by Richard Nixon and Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, notably in Iran. Democrats suffered huge losses in 1978.
It is not yet clear where Obama is headed. It will all depend on how he assesses his own performance, and what he makes of that assessment. Either he will identify shortcomings, take responsibility whether or not he believes he is to blame, and make the necessary changes. Or he will grow increasingly frustrated and obstinate and miss the critical opportunity to grow in office.
So far, unlike JFK, he has displayed a hesitance to take responsibility, most recently regarding the foiled terrorist attack over Detroit. This has exacerbated the tensions within his administration that have left the White House bickering, through press leaks, with the Pentagon over fundamental strategy in Afghanistan.
It remains to be seen what lessons the President has learned from his tribulations over health care, and how he will apply them in the future.
Now is the moment for Obama to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
At the end of 1961, President Kennedy learned from his aide Theodore Sorenson that a number of reporters were planning to write books about his first year in office. “Who would want to read a book about disasters?” Kennedy replied mordantly.
Obama’s first year has been nowhere near as bad. But he has yet to show that he has handled the learning curve so that his presidency will be remembered more like JFK’s than like Jimmy Carter’s.
Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University and author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln” and “The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008.”
