Top 10 Obama White House surprises

OBAMA FOR USA

Think back to December 2008. Barack Obama had just won a sweeping electoral victory, and the press was speculating about the ways in which Obama had changed America: high-tech campaigns, the post-racial future, even bipartisanship.

But Barack Obama’s first year as president wasn’t always exactly what Americans expected.

The very first thing that surprised us about Obama was just how quickly he let go of the animosity of the Democratic presidential primary against Hillary Clinton — offering the job as secretary of state just weeks after being elected president. Since then, the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency has been one of near-constant surprises, as the nation learned even more about its new commander in chief, who after all, had been a largely unknown figure just a few years before.

Here are the 10 biggest surprises of 2009:

It’s possible to say “no” to Barack Obama

In the heady post-election days, Obama looked unstoppable after beating John McCain. More than a million giddy Americans would head to the National Mall for his swearing-in ceremony.

Obama used that superheated mojo to get people to do what he wanted. Soon, he was pushing through a massive $787 billion stimulus package over the futile objections of congressional Republicans and firing Rick Waggoner, the CEO of General Motors. It seemed as though he could do almost anything he wanted.

But almost as quickly as it came, the aura of invincibility faded. It began gradually — in May, the Senate voted to block funding for the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, rejecting a core Obama campaign promise. Then his poll numbers started to come down to earth, declining from 67 percent approval in May to 52 percent today, according to Gallup.

And in October, perhaps the first direct “no” the president had heard: The International Olympic Committee rejected Obama’s personal entreaties to award the 2016 Olympics to his hometown of Chicago. And just like that, it had become possible to say no to Barack Obama.

Then in December, Obama summoned the nation’s top bankers to the White House to urge them to stop their lobbyists from blocking financial regulatory reform on Capitol Hill. But in the days that followed, it became clear that the bankers had no intention at all of changing their lobbying tactics on the bill.

He’s more like George W. Bush that you thought

Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration time and time again on the campaign trail in 2008. But in 2009, he suddenly found a surprising number of ways to agree with his predecessor.

Obama initially invoked Bush-ian logic in rejecting a watchdog group’s request for a list of health care executives who had meetings at the White House — sounding a lot like the Bush administration fighting to keep its energy task force meetings secret. The Obama White House relented in part after being sued and released the names of several executives. Since then, Obama has begun to regularly release details on many of the people who visit the executive mansion.

On the campaign trail, Obama also bashed the Bush administration’s 2003 deal with the pharmaceutical industry that blocked the government from negotiating prices with the nation’s drug makers. But during the summer, his administration gave the drug makers the same deal if they’d back his health care plan.

And the president continued his George W. Bush impression when he announced a “surge” of forces in Afghanistan — just as Bush had done in Iraq just over two years earlier. Which leads us to …

The anti-war candidate is not always against war

Part of Obama’s appeal in the 2008 presidential primary was that he had opposed the Iraq war from the outset — a position he used to flog Clinton, who had voted for the unpopular war. As a result, Obama attracted a following brimming with pacifist liberals who didn’t want war in any situation. They largely overlooked Obama’s campaign trail distinction between Iraq, which he said was a war of choice, and Afghanistan, which was thrust upon the nation by the Sept.11 attacks.

But they couldn’t ignore that distinction after Obama announced he would commit to a Bush-style “surge” in Afghanistan. “This is not the change we voted for,” lamented the liberal talk radio host Bill Press after Obama announced his decision in a December speech at West Point.

No-drama Obama? Still (largely) drama free

On the campaign trail, Team Obama earned a reputation for being remarkably free of the kind of internal dissent that shredded morale inside the Clinton team. Not many savvy Washington pundits, however, expected that to translate into the White House — where even low-level staffers tend to think about their historical legacy and plot the chapter headings of their tell-all books.

Even the famously buttoned-down Bush administration, after all, had broken down into near open warfare between the Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Colin Powell’s State Department.

What’s remarkable is how little tension there has been within the new administration. No-drama Obama continues to hold. Sure, there have been cracks in the façade — the unceremonious dumping of White House Counsel Greg Craig seemed a lot like the old Washington. Reporters secretly root for an open break in the Rahm Emanuel/Valerie Jarrett relationship. And Obama’s call for accountability in the case of the would-be bomber on Christmas Day sure sounded like someone’s head is going to roll. But so far, Obama has presided over an unusually harmonious White House.

The press may love him, but he doesn’t love them back

At rallies and speeches, Obama uses a stock phrase whenever someone in the crowd shouts out “I love you” to him. “I love you back,” Obama says.

But not always. The national press has been all but shouting “I love you” to Obama all year long as they place him on an astonishing number of magazine covers and send camera crews to the White House for day-in-the-life features and gauzy Christmas specials.

And Obama is not saying “I love you back” to the media. Instead, he offers bracing criticism, as he did Sept. 9 at the memorial service for the beloved CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite: “We also remember and celebrate the journalism that Walter practiced,” Obama said. “It’s a standard that's a little bit harder to find today.” Obama wasn’t done: “What happened today?” is replaced with "Who won today?” he said of today’s journalism. “The public debate cheapens. The public trust falters.”

That’s tough stuff. And although much of the media may think it’s involved in a love affair with the glamorous young president, the truth they may have to face is this: He’s just not that into you.

The incredible shrinking Obama online machine

There’s no arguing that the Obama team used technology to fundamentally change the way American presidential campaigns will be run in the future, making astonishing leaps in fundraising capability and in grass-roots organizing ability. But somehow, despite the predictions of many political sages, they’ve been unable to use technology to equally overhaul the presidency itself.

A campaign that had announced the selection of Biden as Obama’s running mate first over e-mail and text message became a White House in which Obama had to struggle against security and legal concerns to carry a BlackBerry. And although the White House has held Internet town halls, posts regularly on its blog, and updates its Flickr feed regularly, the Internet piece of the presidency feels more like an add-on than something core to the Obama administration’s success.

That may be because the Internet itself is not as well-suited to governing as it is to campaigning. When Obama held a jobs summit at the White House in December, his website urged people to hold their own summits — right at home. “Get your family, friends, and neighbors together and help get America back on track,” read the White House’s pitch.

“Fill out the form below if you’re interested in hosting a jobs forum in your community.”

Somehow, the effort fell flat.

The message masters muddled the health care message

On the campaign trail, Obama pounded in a one-word winning message: Change. In the health care debate, though, Obama never seemed to be able to settle on a single reason why Americans should back his plan. First, he talked about health care reform; then he modified that to “health insurance reform.” He talked about fixing health care and fixing the economy, to “stability and security” for people who already have insurance. For a while there, he talked about the “moral obligation” Americans had to help the uninsured. None of it was very clear.

And that zigging and zagging may be one reason why liberals and conservatives both seem outraged about the (semi) final product.

The post-partisan president meets the vast right wing

Obama began the year with a bipartisan flourish — he invited several Republicans to the White House to watch the Super Bowl. It’s been all downhill since then, as fraying tempers over the deficit, health care, the stimulus and a host of other issues have dashed Obama’s hopes of service as a post-partisan leader.

By September, things looked so different that former President Bill Clinton was once again talking about the “vast right wing conspiracy.” Obama himself seemed to acknowledge the reality of the challenges he faces in getting the two parties to work together after a bipartisan meeting on the economy at the White House on Dec. 9. He didn’t seem to hold out much hope for cooperation after a session in which party leaders pointed fingers at each other.

“I'm confident we can put our economic troubles behind us,” Obama said. “But it's going to require some work and cooperation and a seriousness of purpose here in Washington.”

His biggest diplomatic coup was the “beer summit”

One of Obama’s biggest selling points as a candidate was his ability to bring the U.S. and the world a little closer together after the strained diplomatic years of the Bush administration. But although he turned out 250,000 screaming Germans to hear a campaign speech in Berlin, Obama has had surprisingly little luck turning that worldwide popularity into gains on the diplomatic front.

He’s had trouble getting big contributions of new troops from allies in Afghanistan. The jury is still out on whether he can rally the world against Iran. And although he got good reviews on several fronts, including his nuclear proliferation speech at the United Nations in September, the unlikely highlight of the Obama diplomatic effort in 2009 was the unlikely “beer summit” between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley of Cambridge, Mass.

The event was something of a White House make-up operation, as the president tried to undo the political damage from his statement that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates this summer — comments that put the president squarely in the center of an unnecessary racially tinged national debate. The moment was hokey and contrived, but it seemed to get the two men talking and successfully defused the controversy.

He likes golf more than he likes basketball

This one, we’ve got to admit, we didn’t see coming.

Obama’s public image is ultracool: He listens to Jay-Z! He pals around with superstars! And his basketball playing — images of which were carefully doled out on the campaign trail — made him seem young and vigorous. His slick behind-the-back pass at a North Carolina Tar Heels practice gave him b-ball cred nationwide.

But as president, we’ve seen a lot less of Obama playing basketball and a lot more of him playing golf. And that’s an image that reminds voters a lot more of Dwight Eisenhower than Michael Jordan.

To be fair to the president, he has a basketball court at the White House, where cameras are not typically permitted. So it’s still possible that he shoots hoops more than he tees off. But we know a lot about the president’s golf habit, because the White House press corps loads up into a motorcade every time he hits an area golf course, which he’s done often since Inauguration.

And that’s a side of him that we didn’t see on the campaign trail at all. (POLITICO - Eamon Javers )

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