John McQuaid

In today’s Washington Post, three regular columnists offer summations of the three-week-old Obama presidency. They don’t agree on much.

Michael Gerson says Obama’s much praised pragmatism is in fact a sign that he is an empty vessel. The evidence? Obama, a Democrat, has been more or less in agreement with congressional Democrats on the composition of the stimulus, and has ignored Republican calls to radically change it. And the education money in the stimulus does not attempt to re-engineer the U.S. education system along the lines conservatives want.

Kathleen Parker says Obama is a fumbling amateur. He lacks experience. He wants too much to be liked. His “I screwed up” admission made him look weak.

Ruth Marcus says last week may have been bad for Obama, but hey, it’s only been three weeks and he’s doing pretty well under the circumstances.

It won’t surprise you to hear I mostly agree with Marcus. Presidencies are rarely made or broken in the first three weeks. It’s ridiculous to be drawing sweeping conclusions right now. And the divergent responses illustrate the limits of punditry. It’s hard to say much definitive about the Obama presidency because there’s so little data. Even the kind of impressionistic judgments Parker makes – arbitrary under the best of circumstances – are even thinner because there is no context for them, no existing pattern of presidential behavior to fit them into. The one reliable data point we do have – the stimulus package – appears to be a solid win for the president. But since it may or may not be effective in cushioning the blow of the economic disaster, in retrospect this may not be seen as a great victory.

On a deeper level, though, another reason for the dissonant punditry is that history has started moving rather quickly. We’re all riding raging rapids that are taking us to God-knows-where, and old political orders are breaking down. The standards and values of 1990s-era Washington punditry aren’t going to serve anyone well in evaluating what’s going on.

Sam Tanenhaus’s TNR piece on the death of modern conservatism is a great read, a fascinating and intricate exploration of how conservatives and the Republican Party went so spectacularly awry over the past generation and especially the past eight years. It can’t be adequately summarized here, but one important point Tanenhaus makes is that the conservatism that emerged in 18th and 19th century Britain, defined by Burke and elaborated on by Disraeli and others, was, well, conservative. It valued stability, institutions, and civil society. It was skeptical toward the excesses of capitalism (which tends to corrode civil society by bringing about wrenching economic and social changes) and toward revolutionary fervor (which seeks to destroy existing institutions and transform civil society). Today’s movement conservatism, which Tanenhaus labels the “revanchist” strain, is antithetical to this tradition. It basically views itself locked in an eternal struggle with liberals, government institutions, and elitists that can only end when those enemies are destroyed. Which isn’t a very useful approach when you’re running the government, as George W. Bush found out.

It’s too bad, because capitalism has once again brought us to a dangerous pass and civil society is fraying. It would be nice to see conservatives acknowledge those realities and attempt to grapple with them. But given what we’ve see so far with the stimulus debate, this seems unlikely in the near term. As Tanenhaus concludes:

What our politics has consistently demanded of its leaders, if they are to ascend to the status of disinterested statesmen, is not the assertion but rather the renunciation of ideology. And the only ideology one can meaningfully renounce is one’s own. Liberals did this a generation ago when they shed the programmatic “New Politics” of the left and embraced instead a broad majoritarianism. Now it is time for conservatives to repudiate movement politics and recover their honorable intellectual and political tradition. At its best, conservatism has served the vital function of clarifying our shared connection to the past and of giving articulate voice to the normative beliefs Americans have striven to maintain even in the worst of times. There remains in our politics a place for an authentic conservatism–a conservatism that seeks not to destroy but to conserve.

Barack Obama’s first prime time news conference was instructive in several ways. The president seemed kind of testy, even ticked off, like a parent attempting to restore order between squabbling children. But this worked for him; he came across as pointed and forceful. He tried, with some success, to reset what had become an increasingly irrelevant debate on Capitol Hill, as Republicans complained about the scourge of “government spending,” while swing senators sliced items out of the stimulus bill to make themselves look prudent (when in fact they were being arbitrary). Obama pointed out several times that there is something close to a universal consensus among economists that government intervention, including spending, will help stimulate the economy. He expertly located the naysayers where they belong, outside the mainstream, outside the empirical debate. A shame that this includes most Republicans.

In a broader sense, it’s great to have a president who not only understands policy but explains it well, especially after the near-complete breakdown of the White House policymaking apparatus under Bush. The power to explain can be a potent political tool, and Obama is just starting to employ it.

Last night Jon Stewart tweaked Robert Gibbs for his evasive answers about Obama’s various appointment difficulties. As TDS does so devastatingly, clips of the Gibbs briefing were juxtaposed with now-classic non-responsive responses from Ari Fleischer, Dana Perino and Scott McClellan. Plus: Gibbs looks like the demon-spawn of McClellan and Rove!

Is this fair? Well, yes and no. (On Twitter, Jay Rosen and Ana Marie Cox have been tweaking each other on this topic, Cox having written a piece likening the Obama press strategy – such as it is – to Bush’s, Rosen disagreeing. Today, the Daily Show video became exhibit A for Cox.) Yes, because it is a press secretary’s job to BS the press. Always has been, always will be. And the White House press briefing is almost always a deep font of BS, some of it coming from the White House, some from the media. Jon Stewart should be pointing out that these basic conditions are unchanged even in the new Golden Age of Obama.

But on another level, it’s not a fair comparison. Gibbs’s basic approach (no hypotheticals, repeat talking points to get around embarrassing questions, et al) has been the default approach of press secretaries since at least the Nixon era. But that doesn’t mean that all press secretaries are equal. Each presidency has different ambient levels of BS, influenced by events and political strategies, that shape what happens in those briefings. In the case of George W. Bush, the BS levels were stratospheric. The idea was to to deny that anything even remotely off-message, um, existed.

While Obama has no great love for the White House press corps, he seems to recognize that taking spin to such absurd lengths is counterproductive. As Stewart pointed out, he did multiple interviews with network anchors Tuesday and said he made a mistake trying to push Daschle through. Next week he’s got a prime-time press conference. That said, nobody knows how his relationship with the establishment press will play out. No doubt, at some point Gibbs will be forced to scale the heights of Fleischer-esque mendacity. But I sort of doubt he’ll be able to keep it up.

It can’t be pure coincidence that several of Barack Obama’s top nominees have had embarrassing tax problems. The latest offender, Nancy Killefer, Obama’s choice for the new job of chief performance officer, withdrew today because she hadn’t paid DC unemployment taxes for domestic help. And now Daschle’s out too.

Obviously, whether you are in public service or not, you ought to know the basics of paying taxes and … pay them. But if you’re in the vanguard of “change we can believe in,” there’s no excuse for such carelessness. One reason for these forehead-slapping errors may be the strange relationship most of us have with federal income taxes. For the most part, taxes are something we think about as little as possible. Once a year, we are forced to make an unpleasant reckoning with how much we make, how much we spend and save, and how much goes to various governments. Often at this juncture, a willful ignorance imposes itself, especially when it comes to taxes that aren’t automatically withheld. Do I really have to pay this or this, on top of everything I’m already paying? Perhaps, if I don’t pay it, it will just go away! And you know, most of the time it does go away. Odds are the IRS won’t find out. Until, of course, the president needs your services.

This is a childish and borderline-dishonest way to conduct your affairs, and it’s fascinating that a bunch of earnest Democrats seem particularly prone to it. Rather than straight-up cheating or gaming the system, or trying to dismantle it outright (as we’ve seen Republicans do the past eight years, with varying degrees of success) the Daschle-Geithner-Killefer tax goof is based on an almost-unconscious hope that the system they theoretically want to work … won’t.