W. Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Politicians, like generals, suffer from a tendency to fight the last war. Having meticulously studied the mistakes of their predecessors, they take care to avoid repeating them and make the opposite ones. They fortify Maginot Lines. They overcompensate for past errors. They overcorrect.

It is difficult to think of a contemporary president who has not fallen prey to this temptation. Jimmy Carter reacted against Richard Nixon's ruthlessness and Lyndon B. Johnson's horse trading by becoming both too nice and too disdainful of congressional politics. Carter's micromanagement encouraged Ronald Reagan's propensity for detachment. Bill Clinton came to Washington intent on reversing George H.W. Bush's excessive focus on foreign policy—and proceeded to neglect foreign policy for his first few years. George W. Bush reversed his father's lack of vision and Clinton's indiscipline with his own excesses of grandiosity and punctuality. Even vice presidents do it: blathering, peripheral Joe Biden is the excessive response to silent, all-powerful Dick Cheney.

Barack Obama, too, seems to be caught in this dialectical rut. His early difficulties with health-care reform, which will probably be the defining domestic initiative of his presidency, are the consequence of overlearning Clinton's lessons. Of course, Clinton's mistakes were fateful and ought not to be repeated. Bill and Hillary were far too controlling of the details of policy and not skillful enough at forging political consensus. They drafted an indigestible, 1,342-page bill in secret, and then dumped it on Congress's doorstep. Rather than compromise, Clinton waved his veto pen.

You can diagram Team Obama's game plan by reversing the Clinton playbook. Obama started by courting the major interest groups, and so far none of them—insurers, drug companies, hospitals, or doctors—has come out against him. He has repeatedly stated his flexibility and openness to compromise. Instead of proposing a plan, or even endorsing any specific policies, he has laid out eight broad principles—universality, affordability, portability, quality, choice, prevention, fiscal sustainability, and financial protection—and left the rest to Congress. His allies are outspending his opponents in the air war by 2–1.

Obama's major difficulties predictably derive from reacting too strongly against the Clinton model. Where Clinton went wrong by being too controlling, Obama has given up too much control. Leaving the specifics to Congress has led to a classic sausage-making festival. Neutralizing powerful interest groups has meant dropping sound policy ideas and neglecting essential cost controls. Putting the Democratic legislative barons in the driver's seat has undercut bipartisanship. Not having a specific plan has left Obama in the awkward position of lobbying for something that doesn't exist.

You can see a similar pendulum effect in foreign policy, where the object lesson is not Bill Clinton but George W. Bush. Obama, who did not have much global expertise before coming to office, molded his approach around his predecessor's errors. Bush's naive idealism and unilateralism encouraged Obama's realism and multilateralism. Bush's boycott of North Korea, Cuba, and Iran fed Obama's eagerness to engage pragmatically with those tyrannies. Bush's neglect of the Mideast peace process fed Obama's urge to plunge into it. The new president has reversed the old one's prioritization of Iraq over Afghanistan and, in what has become the political cliché of 2009, tried "hitting the reset button" on relations with Russia.

In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Surely, if not for Bush, Obama's instinct after the Iranian election would have been to side with those risking their lives to free their country; yet for many days he seemed more determined not to spoil his attempts at "dialogue" with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Is it possible to avoid this sort of over-steering? Perhaps the best one can hope for is a rapid shift from antithesis to Hegelian synthesis. And here, the agile Obama looks poised to do better than most. When he miscalculates, as he did in speaking too directly about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., he is quick to own his error. Instead of digging in, he starts digging out. On Iran, Obama belatedly spoke up for the "universal principle that people should have a voice in their own lives and their own destiny." On health care, he appears to be in the midst of reevaluating his approach.

The other factor that helps Obama is that his opponents are fighting the last war, too. Because obstructing "Hillarycare" worked for them politically in 1994, many Republicans seem to think that spiking "Obamacare" will play the same way the second time around. Even if they can, it won't.