By Kenneth Jost, January 30, 2009
Can Barack Obama deliver the change he promises?
As the 44th president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama confronts a set of challenges more daunting perhaps than any chief executive has faced since the Great Depression and World War II. At home, the nation is in the second year of a recession that Obama warns may get worse before the economy starts to improve. Abroad, he faces the task of withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, reversing the deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan and trying to ease the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Still, Obama begins his four years in office with the biggest winning percentage of any president in 20 years and a strong Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. In addition, as the first African-American president, Obama starts with a reservoir of goodwill from Americans and people and governments around the world. But he began encountering criticism and opposition from Republicans in his first days in office as he filled in the details of his campaign theme: “Change We Can Believe In.”
* Is President Obama on the right track in fixing the U.S. economy?
* Is President Obama on the right track in Iraq and Afghanistan?
* Is President Obama on the right track in winning support for his programs in Congress?
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This New Report: The Obama Presidency
Overview of the New Report on the Obama Presidency
They came to Washington in numbers unprecedented and with enthusiasm unbounded to bear witness and be a part of history: the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama on Jan. 20, 2009, as the 44th president of the United States and the first African-American ever to serve as the nation’s chief executive.
After taking the oath of office from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Obama looked out at the estimated 1.8 million people massed at the Capitol and National Mall and delivered an inaugural address nearly as bracing as the subfreezing temperatures.
With hardly the hint of a smile, Obama, 47, outlined the challenges confronting him as the fifth-youngest president in U.S. history. The nation is at war, he noted, the economy “badly weakened” and the public beset with “a sapping of confidence.”
“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real,” Obama continued in his 18-minute speech. “They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America -- they will be met.”
The crowd received Obama’s sobering message with flag-waving exuberance and a unity of spirit unseen in Washington for decades. Despite Democrat Obama’s less-than-landslide 7 percentage-point victory over John McCain on Nov. 4, hardly any sign of political dissent or partisan opposition surfaced on Inauguration Day or during the weekend of celebration that preceded it.
“It’s life-changing for everyone,” said Rhonda Gittens, a University of Florida journalism student, “because of who he is, because of how he represents everyone.” Gittens traveled to Washington with some 50 other members of the school’s black student union.
The inaugural crowd included tens of thousands clustered on side streets after the U.S. Park Police determined the mall had reached capacity. The crowd was bigger than for any previous inauguration -- at least three times larger than when the outgoing president, George W. Bush, had first taken the oath of office eight years earlier. The total number also exceeded independent estimates cited for any of Washington’s protest marches or state occasions in the past.
The spectators came from all over the country and from many foreign lands. “He’s bringing change here,” said Clayton Preira, a young Brazilian accompanying three fellow students on a two-month visit to the United States. “He’s bringing change all over the world.” The spectators were of all ages, but overall the crowd seemed disproportionately young. “He really speaks to young people,” said Christian McLaren, a white University of Florida student.
Most obviously and most significantly, the crowd was racially and ethnically diverse -- just like the new first family. Obama himself is the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother. His wife Michelle, he often remarks, carries in her the blood of slaves and of slave owners. Among those behind the first lady on the dais were Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, whose father was Indonesian, and her husband, Konrad Ng, a Chinese-American. Some of Obama’s relatives from Kenya came as well, wearing colorful African garb.
The vast numbers of black Americans often gave the event the air of an old-time church revival. In quieter moments, many struggled to find the words to convey the significance, both historic and personal. “It hasn’t sunk in yet,” Douglas Collier, a photographer from Detroit, remarked several hours later.
David Moses, a health-care supervisor in New York City, carried with him a picture of his late father, who had encouraged him and his brother to join the anti-segregation sit-ins of the early 1960s in their native South Carolina. “It’s the culmination of a long struggle,” Moses said, “that still has a long way to go.”
Shannon Simmons, who had not yet been born when Congress passed major civil rights legislation in the 1960s, brought her 12-year-old daughter from their home in New Orleans. “It’s historic,” said Simmons, who made monthly contributions to the Obama campaign. “It’s about race, but it’s more than that. I believe he can bring about change.”
For black Americans, old and young alike, the inauguration embodied the lesson that Obama himself had often articulated -- that no door need be viewed as closed to any American, regardless of race. For Obama himself, the inauguration climaxed a quest that took him from the Illinois legislature to the White House in only 12 years.
To win the presidency, Obama had to defy political oddsmakers by defeating then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former first lady, for the Democratic nomination and then beating McCain, the veteran Arizona senator and Vietnam War hero. Obama campaigned hard against the Bush administration’s record, blaming Bush, among other things, for mismanaging the U.S. economy as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After a nod to Bush’s record of service and help during the transition, Obama hinted at some of those criticisms in his address. “The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” he declared, referencing tax cuts enacted in Bush’s first year in office that Obama had called for repealing.
On national defense, “we reject the false choice between our safety and our ideals,” Obama continued. The Bush administration had come under fierce attack from civil liberties and human rights advocates for aggressive detention and interrogation policies adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
Despite the attacks, Obama also sounded conservative notes throughout the speech, blaming economic woes in part on a “collective failure to make hard choices” and calling for “a new era of responsibility.” Republicans in the audience were pleased. “He wasn’t pointing fingers just toward Bush,” said Rhonda Hamlin, a social worker from Alexandria, Va. “He was pointing fingers toward all of us.”
With the inauguration behind him, Obama went quickly to work. Within hours, the administration moved to institute a 120-day moratorium on legal proceedings against the approximately 245 detainees still being held at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Obama had repeatedly pledged during the campaign to close the prison; two days later he signed a second decree, ordering that the camp be closed within one year.
Then on his first full day as president, Obama on Jan. 21 issued stringent ethics rules for administration officials and conferred separately with his top economic and military advisers to begin mapping plans to try to lift the U.S. economy out of its yearlong recession and bring successful conclusions to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By then, the Inauguration Day truce in partisan conflict was beginning to break down. House Republicans pointed to a Congressional Budget Office study questioning the likely impact of the Democrats’ $825-billion economic stimulus package, weighted toward spending instead of tax cuts. “The money that they’re going to throw out the door, at the end of the day, is not going to work,” said Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
The partisan division raised questions whether Democratic leaders could stick to the promised schedule of getting a stimulus plan to Obama’s desk for his signature by the time of the Presidents’ Day congressional recess in mid-February. More broadly, the Republicans’ stance presaged continuing difficulties for Obama as he turned to other ambitious agenda items, including his repeated pledge to overhaul the nation’s health-care system.
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New Report: Political Conventions
By Tom Price, August 8, 2008
Have they outlived their usefulness?
The Democrats and Republicans share a fundamental goal for their upcoming national conventions: to produce scripted television shows that will boost their candidates’ prospects in the general election without showcasing any intra-party squabbling. Under that scenario, convention delegates seem to have nothing to do but cheer Barack Obama and John McCain, whose nominations were virtually assured before the conventions began. If the important decisions are made before the conventions begin, ask some politicians, political scientists and critics in the media, why bother to hold them? Convention supporters argue that the gatherings are needed in case a nomination isn’t settled beforehand. The conventions also make decisions about party rules that can affect which candidates get nominated. And conventions are the one time every four years when the parties become truly national organizations, with delegates and activists from around the country mingling face-to-face.
- Are national political conventions obsolete?
- Should superdelegates be abolished?
- Should an orderly primary election schedule be established?
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Overview of the New Report on Political Conventions
In the days before today’s carefully scripted conventions, anything could – and did – happen, from fist-fights to a verbal attack on a candidate’s wife:
* In 1924, Democrats nominated West Virginia politician John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot, during a 16-day convention that featured a fist-fight and delegates whacking each other’s heads with placards. Famed newspaper curmudgeon H.L. Mencken called the gathering “as fascinating as a revival or a hanging . . . vulgar . . . ugly . . . stupid . . . hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus.”
* At the 1980 Democratic Convention, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who had challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter, resisted shaking Carter’s hand after the president’s acceptance speech.
* At the 1992 Republican gathering, the last convention not successfully scripted from start to finish, conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan delivered what was described as “one of the most scathing convention speeches of the modern era, extraordinary for its attack on a nominee’s wife.” “There is a religious war going on for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared. Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary “are on the other side.”
Many analysts concluded that Buchanan’s speech contributed to incumbent President George H. W. Bush’s loss in the general election. Carter lost after the 1980 convention, as did Davis in 1924.
In fact, divisive conventions usually lead to losing general elections. As Ken Bickers, chair of the University of Colorado Political Science Department, put it, “The party that has trouble unifying itself has trouble winning elections in the fall.” Television’s capacity to carry convention chaos into voters’ living rooms heightened the impact. In response, leaders of both parties will move mountains to avoid convention controversy.
This year, Democratic Party leaders grew terrified as the marathon battle for their presidential nomination slashed and burned its way through the spring primaries and caucuses.
As early as March, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was preaching the necessity of unifying behind a single candidate “a long time before the Democratic National Convention” in late August. As the race between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton continued into late May, Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean pressed uncommitted delegates to pick a candidate so a winner would emerge.
If the race were undecided when the primaries ended, Tennessee Gov. Philip Bredesen suggested, party leaders and activists – the ex-officio “superdelegates” – should meet in early June to pick the nominee. Tom De Luca, a Fordham University political science professor, even proposed moving the convention itself to June – a logistical impossibility – to avoid a summer of post-primary campaigning.
Clinton , of New York, finally conceded on June 7, after Obama, of Illinois, collected enough delegates to clinch the nomination in the final primaries on June 3. Many candidates with fewer votes than Clinton had carried campaigns into the convention, but party leaders successfully pressured her to drop out.
“The big obstacle was her wanting to keep her standing with fellow Democrats,” says Mark Rubinfeld, chair of the sociology program at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. “Their message was very clear: We’ll let you go to the end of the primaries, but for the good for the party we don’t want you to take it any further.”
Democratic leaders rejoiced at Clinton’s acquiescence, particularly since Sen. John McCain of Arizona had wrapped up the Republican nomination in February and was busy wooing GOP voters who had supported other candidates. The end of both races, however, left both conventions with few real decisions to make.
As many as 50,000 people – including 15,000 connected with the news media – are expected to descend on Denver for the Democratic Convention Aug. 25-28 and on Minneapolis-St. Paul for the Republican confab Sept. 1-4. Yet the world already knows – barring the completely unexpected – that Obama and McCain will be the presidential nominees. They are expected to name their running mates before the conventions begin. Party leaders are working doggedly to avoid divisive fights over platform planks or party rules.
Telecommunications technology contributed greatly to the conventions’ demise as decision-making bodies.
When Democrats gathered for their first national convention in 1832, the give-and-take of political negotiations could occur efficiently only in face-to-face meetings. That remained true until direct-dial long-distance telephone service became widely available and affordable in the 1960s, according to political analyst Michael Barone.
Previously, politicians “could start communicating with each other only when they got off the train at the convention city,” Barone pointed out. That changed when politicians “could negotiate and convey information confidentially over the phone.” Now, he said, “the communication that once could take place only in the convention city during convention week is going on all the time, all around us.”
Until radio broadcast the first convention in 1924, the general public learned about the proceedings only by reading accounts in newspapers or magazines. Few Americans actually saw the proceedings until television began covering the conventions in 1948. By the 1960s, conflict at conventions was seen by voters across the country.
To avoid unwanted convention activities, Republicans actually wrote a script for each session of their 1972 gathering. They delivered copies to the television networks each night to facilitate planning of the next day’s coverage. Both parties have tried to do the same every year since.
The spread of primaries, particularly beginning in 1972, further reduced the importance of conventions. Candidates discovered they could jump-start their campaigns by doing well in the first contests of each presidential year – the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Other states, resenting those small states’ out-sized influence, pushed their contests ever-earlier in the year.
By the 1990s, candidates were clinching both parties’ nominations before the end of March. In 2008, 34 states voted by Feb. 5, and McCain clinched the GOP nomination when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s withdrew on Feb. 7.
With the nominations sewed up months beforehand, both parties turned their conventions into four-day-long television advertisements for their candidates. The networks rebelled against being used as unpaid advertising conduits and chafed at having little real news to cover.
By 1980, ABC, NBC and CBS had reduced their convention coverage to a few hours each night. In 1984, Jeff Gralnick, ABC’s executive producer for convention coverage, termed the meetings “dinosaurs.” Four years later, ABC News President Roone Arledge called the 1988 Republican Convention “as scripted as any prime-time program,” which left journalists “nothing to cover.”
In 2004, the three networks broadcast from each convention for just about three hours each week. Similar coverage is expected in 2008. Although PBS and cable news channels continue to cover the conventions “gavel to gavel,” fewer voters watch those outlets, so the conventions’ value as free advertising declined.
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