Obama needs results in coming months

In the first six months of his presidency, Barack Obama has launched a broad agenda aimed at producing the change he promised in last year’s campaign. In the next six months, he needs to show results.

Since taking office, Obama has moved aggressively to end the recession and fix its underlying causes, proposed wide-ranging measures to revamp the health care system and curb global warming and set a new tone in American foreign policy. But polls show his support for undertaking those steps is beginning to fade, and concern about their efficacy is on the rise.

So Obama needs to show that his stimulus measure is ending the economic decline and starting a recovery, that his foreign policy is producing results in Afghanistan and Iran and, most important, that he can deliver on his promise to enact the health care reform Democrats have promised for years.

His emphasis on the latter, plus his level of public support and Democratic majorities in Congress, means failure to pass some sort of health bill that extends coverage and curbs costs would be disastrous for the rest of his presidency. But it would certainly suit some Republicans who oppose him on the substance of his proposals, as well as politically.

“If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo,” Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina said last week. “It will break him.”

That may be an exaggeration, but his comments, echoed by other GOP partisans, underscore the political stakes.

Fortunately for Obama and the country, other Republicans like Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Olympia Snowe of Maine recognize there is a health care problem and are making a serious effort to work with the Democrats to craft a bipartisan bill. And all signs are that Obama, who has never actually proposed his own bill, is willing to do whatever proves necessary to sign a measure that extends coverage and curbs cost to the degree he can claim success.

Still, his high-profile campaign of speeches, travel and Wednesday night’s televised news conference recognizes that the next few weeks are crucial in reshaping pending measures to meet economic and political concerns about their cost and maintaining the momentum needed to pass them.

Even if Congress can’t meet Obama’s initial August deadline for passing bills through both houses, Democratic leaders understand they need to pass something by year’s end.

Meanwhile, the health care debate is obscuring other items on this president’s very full plate.

‘Cap and trade’

Another complex, controversial bill, the so-called “cap-and-trade” energy measure to curb carbon emissions believed responsible for global warming, barely passed the House and seems in more trouble in the Senate than even health care. And lawmakers are struggling with his proposals to restructure the nation’s financial markets to fix the problems that caused the economy’s current woes.

The breadth of Obama’s agenda — and his demands for action this year — certainly will make it possible by the end of the congressional session in December to assess the extent to which he has succeeded in converting concern over the economic crisis into viable action. It also should be more evident whether the massive economic stimulus bill passed in February, along with the natural business cycle, is producing the upturn already foreshadowed in some economic indicators. Even then, Democrats could suffer politically next year from an unemployment rate that might be higher than it is today.

Barring something akin to a terrorist attack, these domestic issues seem likely to keep overshadowing international developments. But the next six months should provide evidence whether Obama’s stepped-up effort in Afghanistan is succeeding. Defense Secretary Bob Gates conceded the administration has about a year to show progress.

Similarly, it should begin to be clear if there is progress in efforts to discourage nuclear weapons development in North Korea and Iran and to spur talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

The slow decline in Obama’s approval rating has encouraged his opponents to think they can block his effort to convert last year’s electoral success into a successful, groundbreaking presidency. But six months is too soon for any conclusive verdict.

X Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.