Obama's First Year: What Went Wrong

NBC Los Angeles takes a crack at it:

As the Obama administration marks its first birthday, there is no reason to shop around for the perfect present. What President Barack Obama needs most is obvious: a new political strategy — ideally one more grounded in the realities of governance than the one he embraced a year ago Wednesday.

Republican Scott Brown’s astonishing Senate victory in Massachusetts does not spell doom for Obama’s agenda, even if many Democrats are acting as though it does. He remains a president who scores more than 50 percent in most polls, and whose party controls Congress. That’s more than enough clout for an ambitious president to dominate Washington.

But Massachusetts marked the final, crushing piece of evidence against the theory of the case that animated Obama’s first year. Simply put, that theory — which made some sense a year ago — turned out to be wrong.

Specifically, it was wrong on three major counts:

• Obama and his team believed that the 2008 election represented something seismic — in other words, something fundamental and long-lasting — in the country’s governing landscape. They believed that the historical cycle had turned, that voters had not only rejected George W. Bush’s brash conservatism but also had moved beyond Bill Clinton’s tepid and defensive-minded progressivism.

The nation’s problems and mood, the thinking went, put momentum behind Obama’s vision of robust, large-scale government action. But there has been no seismic shift. The county’s ideology is fluid — and depends on perceptions of the economy and the daily flow of news out of Washington. The assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naïve in retrospect.

• Obama believed that early success would be self-reinforcing, building a powerful momentum for bold government action. This belief was the essence of the White House’s theory of the “Big Bang.” Success in passing a big stimulus package would lead to success in passing health care, which in turn would clear the way for major cap-and-trade environmental legislation and “re-regulation” of the financial services sector — all in the first year.

This proved to be a radical misreading of the dynamics of power. The massive cost of the stimulus package and industry bailouts — combined with the inconvenient fact that unemployment went up after their passage — meant that Obama spent the year bleeding momentum rather than steadily increasing public confidence in his larger governing vision. That vision was further obscured for many Americans by the smoke from the bitter and seemingly endless legislative battle on Capitol Hill over health care.

• Most devoutly of all, the Obama team believed that there was something singular about the president’s appeal and ability to inspire.

This faith seemed well-placed in the context of 2008, when Obama won states such as Virginia that Democrats had not carried in decades. But it was misplaced in the context of 2009. Virtually everything Obama did to fill in the blanks on the timing and specifics of the agenda he had run on managed simultaneously to unite Republicans in opposition and divide Democrats into camps that thought he was going too far or that thought he was not going far enough.

I think a lot of this could be summed up in a piece I wrote almost a year ago to the day:

Obama Shocked to Discover He Has No Actual Magical Powers

Still works today.