WASHINGTON — With political ill winds blowing all around it, an undaunted White House rolled out a message of accomplishment to mark the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration a year ago today.
The near confluence of the administration’s first year with Tuesday’s special Senate election in Massachusetts made the task a tougher one, the victory for the Republican candidate a reminder of the toll joblessness and a bitter health care reform debate have taken on the mood of voters.
In an interview with regional newspapers that included The Denver Post, senior White House strategist David Axelrod conceded few mistakes, ticking off a list of accomplishments that included the credit card holder’s bill of rights, the restoration of robust stem-cell research, and the restoration of America’s battered image abroad.
The new president inherited an economy on the brink of collapse, Axelrod said, and steered it within a year to modest recovery.
“These were not things we wanted to do; these were things we had to do. I think history will look back at those decisions as important and fateful,” Axelrod said of such initiatives as the financial rescue and the administration’s economic stimulus.
“But the fact is that this storm has left a great deal of wreckage — there are 7 million jobs lost — and that is a source of continuing concern and focus for us in this new year,” he said.
That year is likely to be very different from the last, as the White House retools political tactics to meet what Axelrod conceded was a significantly shifted political terrain.
He said that the same voter anger that swept Obama into the White House and the Democrats into powerful majorities in both the House and Senate was now directed at the party in control.
“There is an awful lot of anxiety among middle class Americans . . . . It’s not exactly a revelation to us. That’s why we’re here,” said Axelrod, senior adviser to the president and a strategist for Obama’s winning 2008 campaign.
While continuing to press the notion that it is Democrats who are fighting to solve the nation’s toughest problems, Axelrod said that in 2010 the agenda will be more narrow, the message more populist, and that the president will spend more time out of Washington — doing campaign-like swings that will last several days at a time.
He suggested that major agenda items such as immigration reform and climate-change legislation may face delay. Asked for the administration’s top priorities for the year, Axelrod listed only a new jobs package and financial regulatory reform.
“It needs to be about jobs,” said a senior Democratic strategist with knowledge of the White House plans. “Casting health care, casting clean energy and anything else as being about jobs is certainly going to be important.”
Republicans see the election of Scott Brown in the special election to choose a successor to Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy as a sign of a broad voter rejection of Obama’s policies — the sweeping reform of the country’s health care system chief among them.
Brown managed to close a large gap in the polls by vowing to vote against the reform plan and casting himself as the defender of the middle class against Democratic tax increases.
“Can you imagine if a year into a Republican administration, we were losing in Alabama?” asked Grover Norquist, a veteran Republican strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform.
“I’ve got news for (Democrats). People know what they are doing. They are not voting against nothing. They are not voting against inchoate fears. They are voting against what they are doing,” Norquist said.
William Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, cautioned that the most important thing about a president’s first year is the ability to learn from it. John F. Kennedy’s first year — which included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the erection of the Berlin Wall — was in many ways a disaster, he said.
Galston said he believes Obama made a significant error by pressing a big domestic agenda on top of trying to address the economic crisis, but that what’s important now is whether the administration adjusts.
“I think Obama’s first year has been better than some and worse than others,” Galston said. “The real question about the first year for any president is what conclusions does the president draw and what changes does he make.
“In most of the areas, Obama’s honest grade is incomplete. What about Iran? Incomplete. What about North Korea? Incomplete. For that matter, health care is incomplete, to say nothing of the economic recovery package,” he said.
