JOIN USIn Republican victories, the tide turns starkly
Now, President Obama must find a way to recalibrate with nothing less than his presidency on the line. The verdict delivered by voters on Tuesday effectively put an end to his transformational ambitions and left him searching for a way forward with a more circumscribed horizon of possibilities.
Facing a hostile House with subpoena power and a diminished majority in the Senate, he will have to figure out the right blend of conciliation and confrontation to reassert authority and avoid defeat in 2012.
The most pressing question as Obama picks through the results on Wednesday morning will be what lessons he takes from the electoral reversals. Was this the natural and unavoidable backlash in a time of historic economic distress, or was it a repudiation of a big-spending activist government?
Was it primarily a failure of communications as the White House has suggested lately, or was it a fundamental disconnect with the values and priorities of the American public?
“He will read the results carefully and hear the messages the American people are sending,” David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, said. “I think he’ll do that with care and with humility. But he’s also very centred, and his impulse is to focus on what we do next and how we respond in a way that’s constructive.”
Obama remained out of sight on Tuesday night, watching the returns in the White House residence with his family, but he plans to hold a news conference on Wednesday afternoon to call on the country to put the divisive elections behind it and forge bipartisanship for a new era, aides said.
He will soon invite leaders of both parties to meet to develop a common agenda to fix the economy and tame the deficit.
Unmistakable message
But fresh from their victories, Republicans may have little incentive to defer to Obama. “The American people have sent an unmistakable message to him tonight and the message is: change course,” Representative John A Boehner of Ohio, the putative new Republican speaker, said.
In the days leading up to the election, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
The viability of the new political order in Washington will get a swift test when Congress returns to town for a lame-duck session this month.
Obama may have to give ground and agree to at least a temporary extension of expiring tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, not just the middle class as he favours. He will be pressured to show that he is serious about reining in government spending.
Beyond the near term, the president appears likely to turn to more incremental initiatives in Congress and more aggressive use of his own executive authority to advance his agenda.
In a recent interview, Obama listed areas where he thought he might be able to work with a new Congress: reforming immigration, curbing deficit spending and overhauling education.
“The president is somebody who knows he’s not going to have his way on these things, that he needs Republicans and he has the ability to reach out to them,” said Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, the most prominent Republican in the administration.
At the same time, much of Obama’s time may be spent on the defensive, fending off efforts by House Republicans to repeal or refuse to finance the health care programme he pushed through this year.
Of course, he will still have a relatively free hand in foreign policy, as he will demonstrate by leaving town on Friday for a long-delayed trip to Asia.
Obama finds himself in a similar position to his two most recent predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, each of whom endured a midterm election that handed Congress to the opposition.
While distinguished by different factors, each of those elections was cast as a referendum on the president. Thirty-seven per cent of voters in exit polls on Tuesday said they cast their vote to express opposition to Obama, compared with 24 per cent who said they were trying to support him — almost identical to the numbers for Bush four years ago.
Clinton responded to his party’s 1994 losses by tacking to the middle and cutting deals with Republicans on welfare while outmaneuvering them during a government shutdown. With the Iraq war effort flailing, Bush fired defence secretary Donald H Rumsfeld the day after the 2006 election, but battled with Democrats over war spending and other issues.
Polarisation
Strategists on both sides said the lessons of the past offered only limited utility. As politically toxic as the atmosphere in Washington was in the 1990s, the two sides appear even more polarised today.
The Republicans may be more beholden to a Tea Party movement that abhors deal cutting, while Obama has not shown the same sort of centrist sensibilities that Clinton did and presides in a time of higher unemployment and deficits.
“I know Clinton; he was an acquaintance of mine. Obama is no President Clinton,” said former Representative Dick Armey of Texas, who as House Republican leader squared off against Clinton at the time and today is a prime Tea Party promoter. “Personally, I think he’s already lost his re-election.”
That remains to be determined, but he can expect a rough two years. If nothing else, both Clinton and Bush saw what can happen when the other side gets subpoena power. Legitimate oversight and political fishing expeditions can both take their toll.
“Even when carefully managed, these investigations can be distracting to senior White House officials,” said W Neil Eggleston, who was a White House lawyer under Clinton and later represented an aide to Bush during a Congressional inquiry.
Still, Obama wields the veto pen, and his Democratic allies in the Senate will provide a firewall against Republican initiatives.
The possibility of gridlock looms. And in the White House, there is hope that Republicans descend into fratricide between establishment and Tea Party insurgents, while Obama presents himself as above it all.
Former Representative Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia, said it was hard to see Obama finding common cause with Boehner or McConnell, the Republican leaders.
“Obama’s denigrated Boehner and McConnell by name — not very presidential,” Davis said. Moreover, both sides will have to answer to partisans on the left and the right with little interest in compromise.
“There’s going to be a lot of posturing to the base,” Davis said. “I think it’s going to be ugly, at least at first.”