Boston, Massachusetts
Two of the Democrats’ biggest beasts take to the papers today to urge Obama to make their issue his top priority. In the New York Times Al Gore calls for immediate action on climate change while in the Washington Post Ted Kennedy declares that ‘Health Care Can’t Wait’.
This is a taste of the pressure Obama will come under in the next few months; everyone knows that his political capital will never be this high again and that the first two years of his administration offer the best chance of enacting an irreversible political shift. Indeed, there are still political ads running on television—but they come from Democratic interest groups not the campaigns. One is from an Al Gore-inspired advocacy groups and the other is on healthcare from the SEIU.
We know that Obama’s first priority will be a stimulus package, which given the state of the economy will be relatively uncontroversial. But what he does after that will be fascinating. Obama, for all the grand rhetoric, is a surprisingly cautious politician. My expectation is that those expecting dramatic action on climate change will be disappointed, the economic situation makes the politics of this too hard, and that Obama will choose to make incremental progress on health care.
When it comes to the details of health care legislation, we can expect another Democratic big beast—Hillary Rodham Clinton—to have something to say. Watching how the White House handles Clinton and Kennedy as it tries to do health care will show us just how good Obama is at handling big egos.
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