Grading Obama’s 100 Days

There are two ways to grade Obama. You can use the media’s metrics and essentially assign all the weight to one issue: the recession. Or, you can evaluate his presidency holistically, and look at the long-term consequences of his policies. 

If we use the media’s metrics, then Obama’s performance has been nothing short of heroic. He is hailed as courageous because he can produce spending bills of enormous proportions really quickly. The media stands in awe (and shock) at his spending blitz. If we use real metrics, then Obama’s first hundred days have been deeply troubling. This is so not because they forecast America’s “socialist” demise. Instead, they are worrying because the high levels of spending now surely are unsustainable for the future. Yes, I know - Bush and the Republicans presided over a huge deficit. But that does not give Obama license, even in tough times, to add insult to injury. Those of us who have criticized out of control spending from the get go do not need to cave to this cheap liberal talking point. The fact that our fiscal future has been mortgaged for present recovery would be more reassuring if we at least had a spending bill to be confident in. But despite the speed with which the stimulus bill was produced, the actual spending itself will not take place for the most part until next year. If a stimulus is supposed to be large and speedy, then this one surely isn’t characterized by the latter. 

By the media’s metrics, Obama is the next FDR. But FDR’s armada of spending and regulation produced nearly 10 years of double-digit unemployment. He chose to favor unions over management, insider workers over outside job seekers, and America paid the price. FDR won the psychological battle against the investors by replacing Hoover’s deflationary, gold-standard regime with a reflationary one. That was a success in that it got America out of its deflationary spiral. But that was only step one. Resurrecting aggregate demand never happened until America entered the war. If the best Obama will achieve is FDR’s mixed record and long legacy of bureaucratism, then God help him. 

This is not to say that Obama hasn’t accomplished anything. He should be commended for shutting down Guantanamo Bay, but even here his haste (or hubris) has stuck him with the conundrum of deciding what to do with the detainees. His foreign policy has been rather successful. Barring future flare ups, he is right to wind down responsibly in Iraq while elevating the response in Afghanistan. If he can talk Canada and other NATO allies to extend their missions, he will have a truly impressive achievement on his resume. Still, the handshake with Huge Chavez was unnecessary and somewhat insulting, given that the man poses no security threat to America (unlike Iran or DPRK) and likely got more attention than he deserved. By sheer volume of “things done” in the first hundred days, Obama would be considered an overachiever. But this overachiever attitude hints at the fact that Obama is working on borrowed time. Let me explain: 

Before the financial crisis, Obama had probably planned to serve until 2016. That would have meant eight years for him to right Bush’s wrongs, and produce the kind of social welfare policies that he had wanted for so long. Another “Great Society,” perhaps, only this time without the Vietnam War and noxious racial conflicts. The deficit would have grown, but probably not by meteoric proportions. Most importantly, he would have departed office before any of America’s long term problems - social security, medicare, immigration, the fiscal deficit, and the national debt - would have materialized. This was the type of president Obama wanted history to remember him as. But time has now been cut short by the financial crisis. The present moment demands that Obama spend a lot of money to stimulate the economy - anything else would be political suicide - which means he is bound to tangibly enlarge the deficit in the here and now, under his watch. He can then proceed to either rectify America’s fiscal future - and thus dash his hopes of creating the society he wants - or spend more money to put his vision into reality. He has evidently chosen the latter, throwing fiscal sanity into the wind. Because he has chosen to be both the president of his own desires and the president that the present moment demands, he must legislate at an accelerated pace. He must produce all the spending and regulatory bills he can before his political capital is exhausted, as once the Republicans reorient themselves and start talking about the long-term fiscal problems, the game will be over. The Tea Parties may be a bit foolish, but they are a manifestation of genuine American concern with the nation’s finances. Obama knows that the conversation will eventually center around this, and that he will need to have gotten all he has desired to accomplish before the day Americans wake up to the ugly and sobering truth about their own future. 

The bitter irony is that America’s present dilemma can be characterized with an infatuation with instant gratification. The housing bubble and Wall Street’s magical formulas for packaging away responsibility were all examples of a country that didn’t want to think about the future. Do we now have a president with the same problem? 

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