In a sense, Obama is a victim of his own initial achievements. In his first 15 months, he focused on enacting ambitious new programs, and largely succeeded. Shoved to a back burner, partly because of the recession, was the “conservative” side of his agenda: fixing the deficit and making government more efficient.
Obama’s strength, so far, has been in designing big initiatives and using his Democratic majority to enact them. His weakness has been in politics: convincing voters that these were good things to do.
That’s quite a shift from our last Democratic president. Obama has passed big things and gotten little public credit. Clinton passed small things but managed to extract every possible ounce of public appreciation for them. It helped enormously, of course, that Clinton’s first term coincided with/ended in a robust economic recovery. By the time he faced reelection in 1996, the public’s trust in government — and in him — had rebounded nicely from its 1994 low.
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