"The Next 100 Days"

Marc Ambinder:

The first 100 days have been, in some sense, the easy part. President Obama gave stuff to people. Now he's going to have to ask people to give things up.

Domestically, he has primarily accomplished two things: He has succeeded at client politics (i.e. pleased the Democratic base), and he has gotten the federal government to perform demand-side spending (i.e. given things to people). For his efforts, the American people have rewarded him with an approval rating above 60 percent. And Congress has passed a budget resolution that starts to pay for his top priorities.

So far, Obama has been extraordinarily deferential to the legislative branch, drawing only the broadest of outlines and letting powerful liberal committee chairs in the House and centrist committee chairs in the Senate fill in the details. He's tinkered at times, but mostly he's just listened or occasionally cajoled -- acting as a president who respects the balance of power.

As press secretary Robert Gibbs explained to me in an interview, "This White House does not think in one-hundred day increments." The statement is more than a platitude. As senior officials planned Obama's presidency during the transition, they thought through the year in increments of six months, paying only perfunctory attention to the media's artificial 100 day deadline.

In the second 100 days, one administration official told me, Obama may be somewhat less deferential toward congress - at least with respect to certain issues. He may, for example, use the bully pulpit to press for a cap-and-trade emissions credit system, which Congress has so far failed to make the case for: Selling the general idea of energy reform is easy, but pushing through a specific component that would (at least temporarily) hurt Southern and Midwestern oil- and coal-producing states, is more politically contentious.

On health care, Obama expects substantive progress toward a bill in both chambers. The House's measure will likely include a significant expansion of government-run programs; the Senate will probably go in a different direction, coupling a mandate for insurance with expensive government subsidies for those who can't afford it.

"On health care, it's really simple," a senior administration official told me. "As long as they move to insurance for all and cost containment," the administration will be happy. This isn't to say that the White House won't involve itself in the debate - it will - but Obama will be content to let Congress make the sausage. Obama wants a bill by the end of the year, and he probably will have one. Officials note that there has been an internal debate about whether to press Congress to include a major, public alternative to private insurance plans as part of health care reform. But what Obama will do is an open question.

While Congress works out details behind the scenes, the White House will use the opportunity to set the overall agenda - taking advantage of what incoming communications director Anita Dunn calls a "strategic window" in which the administration can define "where we are going" and "why we are going." As an example, Dunn and several White House officials pointed to Obama's April 14 speech at Georgetown, where he clearly and thoroughly explained how the administration is responding to the economic crisis. He used the engagement as an opportunity to make the case that the recovery plan, which is aimed at saving the banks and easing credit, is the first step in building a new economy based not "on a pile of sand," but on "solid rock."

And what about comprehensive immigration reform - a relatively new priority for Obama? Officials concede that Congress isn't likely to move very quickly, and that the public show of presidential support for the idea was based on the need to make sure that Hispanics - an important part of Obama's political coalition - feel they are tended to. (One can make the same point about organized labor. Though labor's main legislative priority, "card check" elections, isn't viable at the moment, the Obama administration hopes that by endorsing and empowering unions to influence the health care debate in Congress, the type of base unrest that has flummoxed previous presidents can be avoided.)

In the realm of foreign affairs, Black Swans reign: Who would have predicted the ascendance of piracy as a major issue? For now, the administration expects the new Afghanistan-Pakistan policy to keep the president occupied. Many anti-Iraq-war pressure groups and their patrons in the House have already come out and criticized Obama's approval of more troops for Afghanistan. If casualties begin to spike, that opposition could grow - with isolationist Republicans now free to join the cause.

Looming over everything, of course, is the economy. The unknown unknowns stagger. Will the administration ask Congress for more bailout money for lending institutions? Will GM's bankruptcy be expensive? Will economic indicators begin to improve but unemployment continue to expand? How receptive will Congress be to Obama's aggressive financial regulation policy, which would - could - grant strong new enforcement and oversight powers to the administration at Congress's expense?

Meanwhile, disappointed by having been locked out by the House GOP, the administration continues to pursue its political goals. "We need to find a different way to define bipartisanship in a way that isn't measured by the number of Republican votes we get," one of the administration's top officials commented. "We also need to be more consistent with how we present our case to the American people. We've lost some arguments we shouldn't have." The official was referring to the president's stimulus package, which quickly became a partisan football after the White House yielded the salesmanship to Congress. That, the official said, won't happen again.

Barack Obama