It's occurred to me, as I've contemplated the happy prospect of an Obama administration, that inevitably one criticism will be leveled at the new president. Just as people are assumed to have an inability to walk and chew gum simultaneously, administrations—particularly Democratic administrations—are assumed to be unable to devote considerable energy to more than one issue.
This presents a problem for a change candidate. How can you change the status quo—45 million Americans with no health care, a rocky economy, unprecedented rates of home foreclosures, a looming climate crisis, a quagmire in Iraq—if you are prohibited from tackling more than one problem at a time?
Theoretically, it should be possible for an administration to devote time and energy to more than one major issue. Yet practically, as Hillary Clinton was aware in 1993, a focus on NAFTA might mean health care gets short shrift.
So here's the question: if the Obama administration were to focus its energy like a laser beam on only one area of domestic policy, which should it be? The economy, which will surely be the one issue upon which he would have been elected? Health care, and the pent up demand for America to join other Western nations in covering all its citizens regardless of employment? Home foreclosure? Or will foreign policy dominate—getting troops out of Iraq responsibly, improving our standing in the world, both pressing and time-consuming issues.
But we have a clue as to what will be Obama's priority. He's already promised to start working on the environment even before he's inaugurated. According to most scientists, we only have a few years in which to act if we're to contain global warming at (barely) manageable levels. Failure to do so could result in catastrophic consequences the world over. It would be irresponsible for an American administration to continue to ignore the science and go blithely on its way, allowing greenhouse gases to increase without check.
Unfortunately, the public isn't so enamored of the environment. A recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazeete article claims the issue isn't coming up at campaign stops. Instead, voters are worried, understandably, about their jobs, gas prices, health care.
How, then, to appease the public, with their legitimate concerns about their livelihood, and yet still do the responsible thing as president? It will take a selling job by a new administration, a marketing challenge that very few presidents have risen to.
Kennedy convinced us that going to the moon was a worthy goal. Johnson convinced us that poverty was worth going to war over. George Bush, with the help of some dodgy documentation, convinced us that invading Iraq was necessary to combat evil.
Can Obama convince us that the environment—specifically the very real danger of global warming—is worth the laser beam focus of his administration? Can he sell the proposition that green jobs will have a two-fold benefit, to the economy as well as the environment? Can he ensure that people stay in their homes, while fitting those homes with new low-energy lightbulbs?
Can he bring the troops home in time to see a real effect on our runaway deficit? Will this be enough to finance green energy investment?
He's promised a sunshine policy when it comes to health care, specifically, broadcasting meetings on C-Span. Will he do the same when it comes to environmental policy? We've already seen that films about global warming can be entertaining. Perhaps Hollywood will provide an assist here: An Inconvenient Truth II: The Sequel.
When the media starts leveling charges that an Obama administration is too ambitious, unable to focus as it attempts to reverse eight years of Republican mismanagement, how will the American people respond? Better yet, how will the administration respond? Will they overreact to criticism, as the Clinton administration did?
Hopefully, an Obama administration will behave very similarly to the Obama campaign—even-keeled, on-message, even using adverse events to its advantage. It's a story yet to be written, yet one that is interesting to speculate on, as The New Republic did yesterday.
Question: If you were to assign to the Obama administration one priority, what would it be? Why? What if you were allowed two—one domestic, one foreign?
Thoughts?
