Obama's long-distance healthcare race

Pacing, in politics, as in sports, is oftentimes everything. As a politician, President Obama has always been a long-distance runner. When early supporters panicked in the autumn of 2007, a few months before the Iowa caucus , and convened meetings with the candidate to urge a more aggressive stance versus Clinton, Obama told them he was going to adhere to the script created by Axelrod, Plouffe and himself. He did, and a couple weeks before the caucus, he pulled ahead in the polls. When the pundits opined that he was being too passive after the Democratic party's August 2008 convention and was giving an opening to McCain and Palin, he urged his team to stay calm, to stay focused … and sure enough, his poll numbers rebounded. Numerous of Obama's friends told me, while I was reporting my book Inside Obama's Brain , that he is congenitally even-keeled, a man who revels in staying calm under pressure and in remaining consistent despite the shifting sands around him. When President Obama was being pilloried by pundits from all sides – and by much of the general public – for spending too long on forging a Congressional majority to pass healthcare and then lampooned after Scott Brown's upset victory as being a lame duck president who promised much and delivered nothing, he stayed focused. And when Democrats in Congress threatened to stampede away from healthcare reform in the dog days of winter he came out fighting. Over the past two months, Obama time and again urged legislators to show spine; and, in refusing to back down, he ultimately convinced them of the historical urgency of the moment. Late Sunday night, he was rewarded with a truly extraordinary legislative accomplishment, one that brings America in from the cold in the realm of healthcare and dramatically reshapes the American social compact. To put this in perspective : Franklin Roosevelt, the 20th century's most accomplished progressive institution-builder, didn't manage to expand the social safety net to include healthcare. Lyndon Johnson, the century's second-most accomplished reinventor of government, and one of the most manipulative and coercive of presidents when it came to bending Congress to his will, failed to create universal healthcare. And Bill Clinton, the century's last president and one who came into office committed to overhauling the healthcare system, was virtually broken on the wheel over it during his first two years in the White House. The old adage that a year's a long time in politics is proving hopelessly inadequate to describe the country's and the media's relationship to Barack Obama. When Obama was elected, it was heralded as a breakthrough moment for America. Almost all commentators, across the political spectrum, reveled in at least part of the Obama-drama and the 44th president's approval ratings skyrocketed into the mid-seventies. A few months later, the gloss fading, Obama began to be pilloried – he was a fallen messiah, a doomed false prophet. By the summer, the Tea Parties were mobilising and the tenor of the political debate was becoming nastier and more bitter by the minute. By the late autumn, Obama was being castigated by his own supporters as a sell-out, as someone who was sacrificing a once-in-a-century opportunity for transformative progressive political change on the altar of "bipartisanship". He was a stooge of Wall Street, a fake radical, a man more concerned with his image than with substantive governing accomplishments. By February, he was being compared to Carter; ineffective, pontificating, destined to be a one-term failure. And Sunday night , suddenly, he was reborn. Peruse the liberal blogosphere this week and one sees a celebration of Obama-dom again, a pride in his accomplishments, a desire to be a part of a movement once more. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the charismatic, sure-footed, candidate Obama has arisen once more to shunt aside the technocrat who has been living in the White House these many months. Did Obama himself really go through all of these incarnations over the past year? Obviously not. Instead, he hued to a course that he laid down early in his presidency; worked hard to build coalitions; showed both courage and tenacity in not giving up on healthcare reform after the Massachusetts election debacle; and demonstrated confidence – that innate confidence that has guided Obama throughout his extraordinary political career – that in the end his political tactics, his methodology, would generate results. In interviewing scores of people around Obama for my book, I came to think that what made Obama peculiarly fascinating was not so much his idealism but that the veneer of idealism provided camouflage for an extremely effective, wily, player of the game of politics. While in some ways he is intensely idealistic – and clearly many of his supporters during the election campaign were desperate to believe he was all idealism and no Machiavelli – he has never been a purist for purism's sake. He knows how and when to compromise, and he knows how and when to draw lines in the sand. And, as the long, slow, march toward Sunday's healthcare reform vote shows, above all he knows how to pace himself better than the other politicians around him.