Obama Has Stomach for a Full Plate

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JUNE 18, 2009

Obama Has Stomach for a Full Plate

By DAVID WESSEL
WSJ

One thing about Barack Obama: He isn't playing defense.

Much of the president's initial economic agenda was dictated by circumstance. The implosion of the U.S. financial system put the government in the banking and mortgage business and led the president to propose the biggest refashioning of the financial-regulatory regime since the Great Depression. The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler turned the government into the industry's most significant shareholder and strategist. The worst recession in a generation prompted fiscal stimulus that has lifted federal spending, as a share of the economy, to levels unseen since World War II.

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But Mr. Obama isn't stopping at emergency repairs. He's out to make the biggest changes to the American health-care system since the advent of Medicare in 1966. And, as if that's not enough, he wants to change the way the oil- and coal-addicted U.S. economy uses energy to lighten its dependence on foreign oil and reduce carbon emissions to restrain global climate change. Add it up -- government plus energy and transport, health and finance -- and Mr. Obama is tinkering (and, in some cases, more than tinkering) with more than a third of the U.S. economy, using Bureau of Economic Analysis output-by-industry estimates as a gauge. The changes would touch anyone who gets a mortgage, sees a doctor, pays an electric bill -- in short, everyone.

Most Americans don't appear worried about the president's ambitiousness. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked whether Mr. Obama is "taking on too many issues and is not focused enough on the most important ones" or is "focused and is taking on this many issues because our country is facing so many problems?" The reply: 37% said he is doing too much and 60% said he is doing a lot because the problems are so many. (The other 3% weren't sure.) Obama fans insist all this is necessary. "They had to do something on autos. They had to do something on financial regulation. Health is different -- except that it has been an issue for so long and is getting worse," says Laura Tyson, the University of California, Berkeley economist who worked in Bill Clinton's White House. "So that leaves energy and climate change. But there is a major international conference coming up. There is no answer to climate change without international cooperation. And developing countries aren't going to get involved without the U.S. taking leadership."

But the president is running big risks by tackling so much at once. Finance, health care and energy are complex. Yes, there are reasons to reshape each. Yes, with the government already so deeply involved setting rules or structuring incentives in each, a decision to stick with the status quo would be a policy decision -- and probably an unwise one. But sit through a briefing on the intricacies of changing the way hospitals are paid or details of regulating the size of financial companies' capital cushions or formulas for allocating carbon-emission permits among industries, and it quickly becomes clear how many moving pieces are in each of the president's initiatives.

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The risks of mistakes are heightened because the president is expecting so much so fast from people who work for him and from the Congress. Americans think of government as a vast army of bureaucrats. But on any of these major undertakings, big decisions are made by relatively few people in the White House and federal agencies and by leaders of pivotal congressional committees. None of them are getting much rest these days... But looking back at Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy (whose 1961 promise to put a man on the moon within a decade was achieved after his assassination) and Lyndon Johnson (on the domestic side, not Vietnam), the Obama White House sees no reason to be modest in its ambitions or its timetable. It seems to be hoping to get health care through this year, to get financial-regulatory legislation late this year or early next before memories of the crisis fade and, then, to prod the House and Senate toward a climate-change compromise in 2010.

Makes one wonder what Mr. Obama is planning for the second half of his term.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124527116791624499.html (subscription)

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A2

[question everything]

1. Kick. I think that this is a geat analysis (nt)