Building Coalitions, One Issue at a Time

NYT
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — He has been called a socialist by angry critics on the right, an accommodationist by disappointed fans on the left and a pragmatist by his staff. President Obama, who normally eschews labels, pinned on one of his own last week by declaring himself a “New Democrat.”

After eight weeks in office, Mr. Obama has managed to satisfy or outrage nearly everyone on the ideological spectrum. But his once-murky governing philosophy is coming into sharper focus as he pivots from the opening days of his presidency to lay out a broader agenda for the rest of his term.

Obamaism, as it is shaping up, appears to be an amalgam of philosophies — a strong belief in the role of an activist government in shaping the economy and redistributing wealth, and a more centrist view of national security and at least some cultural issues. Mr. Obama has advanced the most expansive spending programs of any president in generations while moderating, but not wholly dismantling, the wartime policies of his predecessor and speaking to some of the values often embraced by conservatives.

The complex blend of ideas and instincts has proved advantageous in electoral politics, helping him win the presidency by blurring differences and appealing across lines. But now in office, it may force him to build different legislative coalitions depending on the issue, a tricky challenge given the scope of his ambition.

He has rallied liberals behind efforts to overhaul health care, tackle climate change and raise taxes on the rich. But he has challenged liberal orthodoxy on issues like linking teacher pay to performance and has won Republican support for sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and pulling out of Iraq more gradually than the left wanted.

“The answer is yes, he is all of those things, but none of them in toto,” said Michael Berman, a longtime Democratic strategist. “I would likely describe him as a moderate who is instinctively comfortable with a variety of progressive positions. He is very hard to label. And my guess is that that is the way he likes it.”

That has sometimes confused opponents trying to pin down his philosophy. “You could pick any moment out of the last few weeks and make a diametrically opposite conclusion, so I just don’t know,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. “He just got here, and when he got to the Senate he started running for president. So nobody up here really knows him.”

Other presidents came to office with longer histories on the national stage and more defined ideological identities, even if actions in office did not always match their images. Ronald Reagan was the Cold Warrior denouncing government as the problem, not the solution. Bill Clinton was the original New Democrat nudging his party toward the center. George W. Bush was the compassionate conservative sanding the harsher edges off Newt Gingrich’s revolution.

Mr. Obama, with only two years in the Senate before starting his presidential campaign, arrived as something of a cipher — a “Rorschach test,” as he once put it — who often seemed to be whatever people wanted to him to be. While compiling a reliably liberal record, he made enough nods toward the other side that he put moderates and some conservatives at ease.

Just before his inauguration, 40 percent of Americans surveyed by The New York Times and CBS News considered Mr. Obama a liberal, while 34 percent called him a moderate and 13 percent a conservative. Even now, aides point to high approval ratings to argue that Americans are comfortable with his approach and that his critics are out of step.

“He’s not an ideologue,” said David Axelrod, his senior White House adviser. “He’s a pragmatist. He’s someone who’s interested in ideas that will work. Some may have their roots in one doctrine; some may have roots in another. But he’s not concerned about that. He’s less concerned about how he’s described than what he can accomplish.”

During a recent interview with The Times, Mr. Obama rejected the “socialist” tag, arguing that he was only returning top tax rates to where they were before Mr. Bush. Asked if “liberal” or “progressive” better defined his philosophy, he said, “I’m not going to engage in that.”

Days later, though, he did engage during a closed-door meeting with moderate House Democrats, later reported by Politico.com. Mr. Obama called himself a New Democrat, a term popularized under Mr. Clinton referring to Democrats who are fiscally conservative, socially liberal and relatively hawkish on foreign affairs.

“If you asked him, I think he’d put himself on the ideological scale as a New Democrat,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. “But I think he’d say that doesn’t fully capture it.”

Others said Mr. Obama does not fit the New Democrat model. Where Mr. Clinton overhauled welfare and balanced the budget, Mr. Obama has overseen more than $1 trillion in spending to fix the economy, set aside $634 billion over 10 years to expand health coverage and proposed forcing industry to pay for pollution credits.

“President Obama is turning out to be utterly and conventionally liberal, embracing record-breaking spending programs and record-breaking tax increases and giving us a record-breaking deficit and record-breaking debt,” Peter Wehner, a former Bush aide, wrote on Commentary magazine’s Web site.

Liberals likewise do not view him as a New Democrat. “Here’s a label if you want one — pragmatic populist progressive,” said Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, an influential group on the left. “It’s not fire-breathing populism. It doesn’t necessarily look the same. But what he’s saying is this has to work for everyone but in a pragmatic way.”

John D. Podesta, who led Mr. Obama’s transition, says the president has embraced the trial-and-error approach employed by predecessors. “That traces back to progressive roots in the kinds of experimentation in reform you saw under Teddy Roosevelt and the experimentation you saw under Franklin Roosevelt,” he said.

At the same time, Mr. Obama has upheld much of the Bush security architecture. While ordering the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama endorsed some Bush positions on holding detainees, guarding state secrets and snatching terrorism suspects from other countries.

On the cultural front, Mr. Obama has liberalized policies on abortion and stem cell research, but also embraced issues favored by the other side, making “responsibility” a regular theme of his rhetoric and retaining Mr. Bush’s office of faith-based initiatives. And he has resisted calls by liberal allies to investigate the Bush team.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who proposed such a “truth commission,” said he understood Mr. Obama’s position. “He has to govern the whole country,” Mr. Leahy said. “He has to bring us back together.”

Former Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, a Republican, said Mr. Obama was smart to avoid fights on secondary issues. “What’s really dominant right now is the economy,” Mr. Davis said. “You can’t afford to alienate people on the cultural front or the national security front while you’re fixing the economy.”