Obama swiftly lays Bush era to rest
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/25/MNEO15G3L2.DTL&tsp=1
Sunday, January 25, 2009
President Obama's first week in office was short - just four weekdays long, and one of them was lost to the pomp and circumstance of Inauguration Day.
But in the brief time he's been in the White House, analysts say, Obama has issued a series of orders, statements and speeches that convey a single message to America and the world: The Bush administration is over.
"I think this is a return to the status quo ante," or the way things were before, said Stanford law school lecturer Allen Weiner. "It's a do-over."
It is not a complete reset. Although Obama reached back to the Clinton era for many of his Cabinet picks, Barack is not Bill and the nation and the world in which he has come to power are dramatically different from what they were in the 1990s.
Obama set a new course almost the moment he became president, with a stinging repudiation of President George W. Bush's administration.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," he said in his inaugural address. "America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and ... we are ready to lead once more."
Since then, Obama has reinforced that message in both symbolic and practical ways with a series of executive orders and policy pronouncements, from freezing his top staff's salaries to moving to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.
On the international stage, Obama's actions were predictably more dramatic than his domestic moves, said foreign policy experts.
He took torture definitively off the table as an interrogation tool and stated that the United States will respect the Geneva Conventions. He shut down the remains of the CIA's secret prison system overseas. He met with his generals to discuss withdrawing from Iraq.
It's easier for a president to make dramatic foreign policy changes because they generally don't require congressional cooperation - and in the first days of a new administration, the new president has the attention of the world in a way that will not last.
"He's using this window ... to try to break the status quo overseas," said Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. "This is an opportunity he can't waste."
Obama's message to the world was clear, said Weiner, co-director of the Stanford Program in International Law.
"The president has essentially renounced the (previous) president's approach to the so-called war on terror," he said. "The idea that we will use extraordinary wartime authorities and claim the powers that are available to the president only in times of war in a far-reaching manner that has never been claimed by the United States government has been renounced."
Unexpected move
At the same time, Obama signaled his own foreign policy approach in an extraordinary appearance at the State Department alongside Vice President Joe Biden and newly confirmed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. There, Clinton announced - and Obama congratulated - two new envoys to the Middle East and to Afghanistan and Pakistan, both skilled negotiators.
The high-profile introductions of former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East and former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, just two days into Obama's presidency, marked a stark reversal from the Bush administration, which was broadly seen as favoring military unilateralism over diplomatic multilateralism and was criticized for failing to engage the Middle East diplomatically until its final year in office.
"(Obama) is clearly putting a priority in these first couple of days on sending a message to the world ... 'We're different. We've changed,' " said Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. " 'We're not the same country. ... We are going to practice active diplomacy. I make this a high priority.' "
Obama's domestic actions have received less attention, and were less profound.
That's not surprising because it's harder to create the appearance of progress with the stroke of a pen on some of America's thorniest issues, said Henry Brady, professor of political science at UC Berkeley.
"When you get to domestic policy, what do you do that's the equivalent in health care?" he said. "You can't say, 'We're going to have an envoy to cancer.' "
Domestic actions
Obama's domestic actions were somewhat disparate - limiting the roles of lobbyists in government, pledging renewed transparency in government affairs, freezing the pay of senior White House staff.
Again, though, the message couldn't have been clearer: The acts signal a rejection of the Bush administration's claim of American presidential exceptionalism, said the Brookings Institution's William Galston.
"Certainly, the widely accepted rap on the Bush presidency was that it was obsessed with secrecy and with the expansion of government power," he said. "President Obama is determined that whatever mistakes his administration makes, they won't make that one.
"They understand that the American people's level of trust in the American government is at an all-time low. An important part of that is a sense that government has been neither 'of the people, by the people or for the people' but has been to some extent hijacked."
The new president, Galston said, understands that renewing that trust is a critical step in furthering his new agenda.
Obama now faces a conundrum: He is rejecting the premise that the president has the power to act unilaterally and without oversight, but has proposed a very challenging agenda that will require enormous political muscle to advance. But the steps he has taken to signal change can also help him build political capital to further his new agenda.
Potentially potent
Take freezing his top staff's salary. The gesture is seen generally as a symbolic recognition of the current financial crisis, but one that could be politically potent, said Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation.
"This is a way of saying this lesson is going to begin here at home. Home is defined as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for now," he said. "The next question naturally will be if that policy standard is good enough for the top people at the White House ... what about the tens of thousands of other people in the executive branch?"
Obama might address that issue in his first budget, Franc said.
"I would suspect there will be something in there that will not be well received by the federal employee unions," he said. The freeze "sets the groundwork."
More broadly, a clear if largely symbolic enunciation of change can provide political momentum to carry the new president forward, Zelizer said.
"That is what a strong inauguration week can do," he said. "You can't get that much legislation done, obviously, but you can give the impression there's movement in a new direction after a very unpopular presidency.
"There's a new set of rules that comes with this new president, and that sets the tone for the first 100 days."
Emerging challenges
There is, however, a saying familiar to military leaders: No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Obama's new approach already is facing its first tests.
Internationally, a New York Times story published Thursday documented how a Yemeni detainee released from Guantanamo resumed a leadership position in al Qaeda, illustrating the challenges to come in shutting down the facility.
On Friday, two remote U.S. air strikes targeting militants killed at least 18 people in Pakistan, the kind of military operation Obama supported in the campaign, but one that outrages Pakistan's government.
In the Gaza Strip, Palestinians resumed smuggling through tunnels under their border with Egypt, acts that Israel has warned it will not tolerate for long.
Domestically, a number of conservatives have begun criticizing some of Obama's moves, such as lifting a ban on federal funds for international groups that support abortion, while some liberals have begun complaining that Obama's plans do not do enough on issues such as investigating the Bush administration's policies or redefining the U.S.-Israel relationship.
The enormous bailout bill is still moving - slowly - through Congress. And members of the White House press corps challenged the administration's pledge of transparency during an hourlong press conference with new White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. A visit by Obama to the press room hours later reportedly turned testy.
How Obama handles those issues, large and small, will help signal how he will handle similar issues in the future - and win or lose him political capital in the present.
In his Inaugural Address, Obama strove to leave political divisions and institutional squabbles behind, arguing that the debate of big government versus small is moot and calling those who question America's ability to achieve out-of-touch cynics. The nation, he said, wishes to be done with childish partisanship and political machinations.
The question to ask at the end of Obama's first week, Galston said, may not be what he has accomplished so far - but whether he is right about who the American people are, and what they ultimately want their president to achieve.
"If he's right about that, he may be transformational," he said. "If he's wrong about that, he may crash into a wall sooner rather than later."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/25/MNEO15G3L2.DTL&tsp=1
Sunday, January 25, 2009
President Obama's first week in office was short - just four weekdays long, and one of them was lost to the pomp and circumstance of Inauguration Day.
But in the brief time he's been in the White House, analysts say, Obama has issued a series of orders, statements and speeches that convey a single message to America and the world: The Bush administration is over.
"I think this is a return to the status quo ante," or the way things were before, said Stanford law school lecturer Allen Weiner. "It's a do-over."
It is not a complete reset. Although Obama reached back to the Clinton era for many of his Cabinet picks, Barack is not Bill and the nation and the world in which he has come to power are dramatically different from what they were in the 1990s.
Obama set a new course almost the moment he became president, with a stinging repudiation of President George W. Bush's administration.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," he said in his inaugural address. "America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and ... we are ready to lead once more."
Since then, Obama has reinforced that message in both symbolic and practical ways with a series of executive orders and policy pronouncements, from freezing his top staff's salaries to moving to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.
On the international stage, Obama's actions were predictably more dramatic than his domestic moves, said foreign policy experts.
He took torture definitively off the table as an interrogation tool and stated that the United States will respect the Geneva Conventions. He shut down the remains of the CIA's secret prison system overseas. He met with his generals to discuss withdrawing from Iraq.
It's easier for a president to make dramatic foreign policy changes because they generally don't require congressional cooperation - and in the first days of a new administration, the new president has the attention of the world in a way that will not last.
"He's using this window ... to try to break the status quo overseas," said Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. "This is an opportunity he can't waste."
Obama's message to the world was clear, said Weiner, co-director of the Stanford Program in International Law.
"The president has essentially renounced the (previous) president's approach to the so-called war on terror," he said. "The idea that we will use extraordinary wartime authorities and claim the powers that are available to the president only in times of war in a far-reaching manner that has never been claimed by the United States government has been renounced."
Unexpected move
At the same time, Obama signaled his own foreign policy approach in an extraordinary appearance at the State Department alongside Vice President Joe Biden and newly confirmed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. There, Clinton announced - and Obama congratulated - two new envoys to the Middle East and to Afghanistan and Pakistan, both skilled negotiators.
The high-profile introductions of former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East and former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, just two days into Obama's presidency, marked a stark reversal from the Bush administration, which was broadly seen as favoring military unilateralism over diplomatic multilateralism and was criticized for failing to engage the Middle East diplomatically until its final year in office.
"(Obama) is clearly putting a priority in these first couple of days on sending a message to the world ... 'We're different. We've changed,' " said Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. " 'We're not the same country. ... We are going to practice active diplomacy. I make this a high priority.' "
Obama's domestic actions have received less attention, and were less profound.
That's not surprising because it's harder to create the appearance of progress with the stroke of a pen on some of America's thorniest issues, said Henry Brady, professor of political science at UC Berkeley.
"When you get to domestic policy, what do you do that's the equivalent in health care?" he said. "You can't say, 'We're going to have an envoy to cancer.' "
Domestic actions
Obama's domestic actions were somewhat disparate - limiting the roles of lobbyists in government, pledging renewed transparency in government affairs, freezing the pay of senior White House staff.
Again, though, the message couldn't have been clearer: The acts signal a rejection of the Bush administration's claim of American presidential exceptionalism, said the Brookings Institution's William Galston.
"Certainly, the widely accepted rap on the Bush presidency was that it was obsessed with secrecy and with the expansion of government power," he said. "President Obama is determined that whatever mistakes his administration makes, they won't make that one.
"They understand that the American people's level of trust in the American government is at an all-time low. An important part of that is a sense that government has been neither 'of the people, by the people or for the people' but has been to some extent hijacked."
The new president, Galston said, understands that renewing that trust is a critical step in furthering his new agenda.
Obama now faces a conundrum: He is rejecting the premise that the president has the power to act unilaterally and without oversight, but has proposed a very challenging agenda that will require enormous political muscle to advance. But the steps he has taken to signal change can also help him build political capital to further his new agenda.
Potentially potent
Take freezing his top staff's salary. The gesture is seen generally as a symbolic recognition of the current financial crisis, but one that could be politically potent, said Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation.
"This is a way of saying this lesson is going to begin here at home. Home is defined as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for now," he said. "The next question naturally will be if that policy standard is good enough for the top people at the White House ... what about the tens of thousands of other people in the executive branch?"
Obama might address that issue in his first budget, Franc said.
"I would suspect there will be something in there that will not be well received by the federal employee unions," he said. The freeze "sets the groundwork."
More broadly, a clear if largely symbolic enunciation of change can provide political momentum to carry the new president forward, Zelizer said.
"That is what a strong inauguration week can do," he said. "You can't get that much legislation done, obviously, but you can give the impression there's movement in a new direction after a very unpopular presidency.
"There's a new set of rules that comes with this new president, and that sets the tone for the first 100 days."
Emerging challenges
There is, however, a saying familiar to military leaders: No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Obama's new approach already is facing its first tests.
Internationally, a New York Times story published Thursday documented how a Yemeni detainee released from Guantanamo resumed a leadership position in al Qaeda, illustrating the challenges to come in shutting down the facility.
On Friday, two remote U.S. air strikes targeting militants killed at least 18 people in Pakistan, the kind of military operation Obama supported in the campaign, but one that outrages Pakistan's government.
In the Gaza Strip, Palestinians resumed smuggling through tunnels under their border with Egypt, acts that Israel has warned it will not tolerate for long.
Domestically, a number of conservatives have begun criticizing some of Obama's moves, such as lifting a ban on federal funds for international groups that support abortion, while some liberals have begun complaining that Obama's plans do not do enough on issues such as investigating the Bush administration's policies or redefining the U.S.-Israel relationship.
The enormous bailout bill is still moving - slowly - through Congress. And members of the White House press corps challenged the administration's pledge of transparency during an hourlong press conference with new White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. A visit by Obama to the press room hours later reportedly turned testy.
How Obama handles those issues, large and small, will help signal how he will handle similar issues in the future - and win or lose him political capital in the present.
In his Inaugural Address, Obama strove to leave political divisions and institutional squabbles behind, arguing that the debate of big government versus small is moot and calling those who question America's ability to achieve out-of-touch cynics. The nation, he said, wishes to be done with childish partisanship and political machinations.
The question to ask at the end of Obama's first week, Galston said, may not be what he has accomplished so far - but whether he is right about who the American people are, and what they ultimately want their president to achieve.
"If he's right about that, he may be transformational," he said. "If he's wrong about that, he may crash into a wall sooner rather than later."