Obama can get past mistakes as a rookie

Opinion: February 3, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By HAROLD JACKSON

There’s a scene in the 2001 film “Training Day” where a drug dealer’s woman played by Macy Gray looks impatiently at a nervous cop played by Ethan Hawke and declares derisively, “You a rookie.”

Indeed. But the rookie gets better, eventually shedding his nervousness and bringing down the corrupt detective played by Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar for his performance. The rookie grew up when he listened to his heart.

Which brings us to another rookie, Barack Obama. He’s made some newbie mistakes, leading some critics to write him off as another Jimmy Carter, a one-term Democratic president. But Republicans are expressing a hope, not a fact. Obama can get past the stumbles he’s made in his first year.

Like most rookies, Obama has been quick to listen to his more experienced mentors, many of whom were key players in his presidential bid. That usually works for a while, but for every rookie there comes a time when he has to figure it out for himself.

Health care

That lesson has been evident in Obama’s stalled effort to enact comprehensive changes to health care.

Like an obedient neophyte eager to please his elders, Obama allowed himself to be talked into seeking the Holy Grail that had eluded the last Democratic president, even though the recession had dealt a severe blow to the timing.

Now it looks as though whatever Congress passes will be much less than what is needed.

Obama should have remembered his history lessons, in particular the chapter on Bill Clinton’s unofficial 1992 campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It’s always the economy. It trumps health care or anything else.

When people are losing their jobs and their homes, they get sick, all right. But it’s financial aid, not medical care, that they want.

Obama was so intent on listening to everyone around him telling him what to do that he didn’t pay enough attention to the public, which was pleading for him to give health care a pass for now and do more about the issue most important to them — their pocketbooks.

Obama campaigned for Jon Corzine, but he didn’t seem to pick up the signal voters sent when they booted the former Wall Streeter from the New Jersey governorship. Voters understood that the recession kept Corzine from giving them the tax relief he promised, but it angered them that his Democratic cronies continued to feed at the public trough.

Maybe Democratic candidate R. Creigh Deeds’ loss in the Virginia governor’s race confused Obama. Deeds wasn’t the incumbent, so maybe Obama thought his defeat wasn’t really related to the economy. Deeds’ poor campaign was instead blamed, and Monday-morning quarterbacks said he was wrong to distance himself from Obama until it was too late to make a difference.

It took the Massachusetts race for U.S. Senate to pull Obama’s head out of the clouds. In what should be the very bastion of a health-care overhaul, a state that has already started down that road, a state that for nearly 50 years sent the drum major for health-care change, Ted Kennedy, to Washington, voters said they coveted something else.

Shocking loss

They elected Republican Scott Brown, evaporating the filibuster-proof majority that Democrats had in the Senate. The loss shook Obama, who started to sound like he would settle for any bit of change he could squeeze through Congress. But Obama shouldn’t back down too much. After all, as White House adviser David Plouffe said, “If we do not pass it, the GOP will continue attacking the plan as if we did anyway.”

The lesson Obama needs to take from the Democrats’ three recent election losses is that the American public has grown weary of the health-care debate. He needs to get it off the front burner by using the legislative tools still available to his Democratic majority to pass the essential elements of the bills that can cut the number of uninsured, then take his lumps from critics and move on.

Americans are ready to move on.

To do that, Obama needs to be decisive. He needs to stop acting like a rookie. That doesn’t mean he has to end his practice of carefully assessing all sides of a particular issue, as he did before ordering more troops to Afghanistan. But his ultimate decision should reflect his certainty in the course taken, as he did not in setting a date for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. He tried to please both sides in that debate.

Writing for the journal Foreign Policy, Walter Russell Mead said such “conflicting impulses” could turn Obama into another Carter, whose “image of weakness and indecision” helped doom his bid for reelection in 1980. Mead warned that Obama must not fall “into the incoherence and reversals that ultimately marked Carter’s well-meaning but flawed approach.”

Though Mead was talking about foreign policy, the admonition should be applied to all things Obama. In every endeavor he must be resolute. Not everyone will agree with him; in fact, some will never agree with him. So what? He cannot forget that he was elected president because people believed he stood for more than political expediency.

He’s a rookie. He’s learning some tough lessons. But, hey, a rookie almost took the New York Jets to the Super Bowl. He didn’t this season, but Mark Sanchez should get better. So should Obama.

X Harold Jackson is editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.