Selling Change With Fear

President Barack Obama is right when he says he won the election, and people voted for change.

In the new Washington, Obama couldn’t have his first choice for Health and Human Services secretary, even though Tom Daschle likely would have been a passionate and effective leader for health care reform.

Daschle is so old Washington – a former senator who raked in millions in speaking and consultant fees from the very industry he would have regulated. And he made larger-than-life mistakes on his tax returns.

We’re on this administration’s shakedown cruise, and the problems Obama has had appointing Washington insiders show how difficult it is to bring change. And yet, for the president to go on TV news shows and admit he screwed up was refreshing. This skipper really is a change from George W. Bush. 

People also voted for Obama’s message of hope, optimism and confidence. But in selling his economic stimulus plan, Obama shares similarities with Bush and every recent president. He’s using not only the bully pulpit but another presidential tool – the rhetoric of fear. And nothing says old Washington like appealing to fear.

To be sure, these are hard times and it’s a tough job getting Congress to approve a huge plan that may or may not fix the economy – even if it does contain goodies for every state and most taxpayers.

But Obama’s rhetoric has grown increasingly grim.

At the end of January, he called current economic conditions “a continuing disaster.“

On Wednesday, he declared, “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe…“

Thursday, the president said:  “The time for action is now, because we know that if we do not act, a bad situation will become dramatically worse. Crisis could turn into catastrophe for families and businesses across the country.“

There’s a reason he ratcheted up the rhetoric. It works. The wheels of Washington rarely turn unless an issue becomes a certified crisis. We’ve had plenty of experience with crisis mode during the last eight years.

Big problems – like the nation’s food supply that occasionally kills people – get batted around for a while and then fall out of sight.

With the economy, unlike most issues, everybody agrees it’s in crisis. The dispute is over how to fix it, without a clear roadmap. Republicans said they wanted a stimulus that spent less and targeted the money differently. They favored more tax cuts, housing aid and short-term job creation. 

Even some who say a big stimulus is necessary, like Alice Rivlin, who was budget director in the Clinton White House,  say it would have been better had Obama separated the package into two parts.

Short-term aid with safety net programs like food stamps and unemployment benefits should have come first, she said, with longer-term programs like education, workforce retraining and infrastructure later. 

To move Congress on his plan, though, Obama also toughened his talk against critics. He started out saying there were legitimate philosophical differences between the Republicans and himself and he wanted to see if they had better ideas for the stimulus.

Then, he dismissed most of the alternatives, saying, “Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed.  They’ve taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they’ve brought our economy to a halt.  And that’s precisely what the election we just had was all about.“

He wrote in The Washington Post of “misguided criticism of the plan that echo the failed theories that help lead us in to this crisis.“

Obama to Republicans and wayward Democrats: I won.

That’s old Washington. 

As the bill moved through the Senate, Obama got down to negotiating big cuts in his plan.  That’s changing the tone. The president working with Congress is what people voted for.

Meanwhile, the recession is spreading a small-d depression, as in a debilitating case of the blues, across America. Consumer confidence is down. People are afraid to buy or to invest. They’re scared of what tomorrow will bring.

It’s at just such a time that Obama’s bright message of change is sorely needed. People need hope. That’s why people elected him.

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