U.S: What Obama still hasn’t figured out about being president

For a week leading up to the
president's Tuesday address, White House advisers
were trying out yet another new catchphrase,
telling any reporter they could find that President
Barack Obama had discovered he had "a phone and
a pen," and he intended to use them in the year
ahead. Up until now, apparently, the president has
been relying on the quill and telegraph President
Rutherford Hayes left behind, so this is kind of a
breakthrough.
This pen-and-phone business represents a pretty
stunning admission from a president five years into
his term – that he and his senior aides are still
groping about for ways to wield the power of the
office, and that they have essentially given up on
legislating. Their latest strategy holds that, since a
small number of Republican lawmakers have
effectively decided to thwart the public will, Obama
must resort to doing the things he can do on his
own, mainly by signing executive orders and
making lots of calls.
Obama has, in fact, governed at a time of intense
polarity and general wackiness in Congress, and at
a time of fast-fracturing media, when the so-called
bully pulpit doesn't command a room like it used
to. But none of this gets to the hard truth that
underlies Obama's lagging approval ratings, which
is that while most Americans may agree with the
president's assessment of what's wrong in
government, they no longer trust him to fix it.
In an ABC News poll released last weekend, a few
days before Obama's address, only 37 percent of
voters said they had confidence in Obama to make
the right decisions, compared with 61 percent
when he took office. Only 47 percent said he
understands the problems of ordinary Americans.
In other words, Obama isn't tanking simply
because nihilistic conservatives are bent on
blocking his policies. Rather, conservatives can get
away with blocking his policies because the voters
aren't persuaded they'll work.
If all of this perplexes Obama and his aides, it
probably shouldn't. Most Americans who voted for
the president in 2008 thought they were getting a
pragmatic reformer who would channel the most
powerful impulse in modern American politics – to
make government work. In this way, Obama
seemed to echo his Democratic predecessor, Bill
Clinton, who remade the welfare system and tore
down the decaying housing projects that were
blighted symbols of bureaucratic failure.
From the start, though, Obama's presidency went
in a decidedly different direction. Facing an
economic catastrophe and buoyed by polls that
showed Americans open to activist government,
Obama set about expanding the reach and
ambition of the federal government for the first
time in a generation. This was likely the right policy
choice, and it might have been fine politically too,
except that Obama's White House has shown little
sustained interest in making government more
efficient at the same time.
There was debate inside the White House, in those
early years, about maybe collapsing some of the
sprawling bureaucracies housed in 20th century
Cabinet departments. Later, in his State of the
Union address in 2011, Obama vowed to bring
government into the information age. ("The Interior
Department is in charge of salmon while they're in
fresh water, but the Commerce Department
handles them when they're in saltwater," he
despaired. "And I hear it gets even more
complicated once they're smoked.")
But all of this came to very little; basically, the
administration's big idea was to fold the Office of
the United States Trade Representative into the
Commerce Department, which went nowhere. Most
often, Obama has generally talked and acted like a
man held prisoner by the systems he inherited,
rather than the guy in charge of them.
No doubt Obama and his allies fear, as Democrats
have since the Reagan years, that publicly
questioning the efficiency of government would
only abet conservative efforts to dismantle it. I get
it. But nothing did more to erode the credibility of
government than the disastrous rollout of the
federal health exchange. That Obama relied so
heavily on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services to design a massive, eBay-like website
tells you a lot about his own abiding faith in
government born of the industrial age.
And such perceptions matter when you're
proposing to increase the investments that
government gets to make. White House aides
should ask themselves why New Yorkers gave
overwhelming support to their new mayor, Bill de
Blasio, and his tax-raising agenda. Sure, residents
of Park Slope and the Upper West Side are
inherently more liberal than most Americans, but
it's also true that they've just enjoyed 12 years of
ruthless efficiency under the Bloomberg
administration. They take for granted the basic
competence of government, and that makes all the
difference when you ask them to expand it.
Obama did announce in his State of the Union on
Tuesday that Vice President Joe Biden would lead
an Al Gore-style effort to re-evaluate federal job-
training programs. That's a good idea, if they're
serious about it. But if Obama's really going to give
up on pushing major legislation (otherwise known
as being the president) and focus instead on
executive orders, then he might as well focus his
power on the one place where he really can make
both a substantive and political difference, which is
reforming the federal government.
On the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty,
Obama could take up the conservative challenge to
review the litany of existing anti-poverty programs
and figure out which ones actually work. He could
establish clear rules to reform the government's
collection of our personal data, rather than leaving
it to Congress and multiple boards. He could learn
the right lesson from the fiasco of the health care
rollout, which is that a lot of archaic agencies
throughout the government aren't up to the
technological challenges of the new age, and it's
time to reboot them.
With three years left in his presidency, Obama still
has time to be something like the generational
figure a lot of Americans hoped he would be,
forcibly pulling government into the digital world.
Or he can spend his time working the phones and
signing small orders with his pen, sort of like the
most powerful claims adjuster on earth.
Sent From David Aniemeka