Can Obama Get His Mojo Back?

Journalism is the first rough draft of history, Philip Graham, the onetime owner of Newsweek magazine and the Washington Post famously remarked. So when a journalist conducts more than 200 interviews to write a book about a year in the political life of the world's most powerful man, it's reasonable to consider the work at least a polished second draft of history.

That's just how Newsweek's longtime national affairs columnist Jonathan Alter sees his latest book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One (Simon & Schuster), which the Los Angeles Times praised as "a deeply reported, soberly appraised account of the president's tumultuous first months in office through passage of healthcare reform."

Alter gave a talk about President Obama's leadership on Monday night at —a fitting location, given that it is the home of Obama's formative years. The Nov. 15 talk, sponsored by the college's Office of Global Affairs, had a somewhat populist title—"Can Obama Get His Groove Back?"—and it spanned everything from Alter's own acquaintance with the president and the challenges he has met to the urgent national issues that could seal Obama's political fate if left unresolved.

Like Obama, Alter is a Chicago native who first met the president in 2002 when he was a state senator from Illinois. Shortly thereafter, Alter interviewed Obama in what would be the first of a many interviews leading most recently to a fireside chat with the president in late 2009.

Alter's book skillfully weaves the climactic events leading to the 2008 presidential election with the backstory about those events. The book opens less than six weeks before the 2008 presidential election, a time when the nation had just been plunged in financial crisis and Obama found himself spending three days in Florida privately preparing for the first presidential debate. "The man was more cunning than anyone knew" as he hatched a plan to woo the 80 million-plus voters who hadn't participated in the primaries and who were "just tuning in," writes Alter.

The rest, of course, is history—and as Alter tells it, Obama correctly sensed victory. "The good news is we're gonna win," Alter quotes candidate Obama as telling his senior campaign staff. "The bad news is the world's falling apart."

Obama has done much to patch up that damage, Alter argued. Most notably, he used his executive powers to spend $400 billion on the federal stimulus package that bailed out U.S. banks and headed off a global financial meltdown. He also made an all-out effort to get the health care bill passed. In fact, Obama's insistence on health care reform was "one of the big revelations I had" about the president, said Alter, adding that both Vice President Joe Biden and Obama's former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had vehemently opposed reforming healthcare because they saw it as political suicide.

Just as President Roosevelt enforced key legislation and used his executive powers to implement widespread economic and development reform during his first 100 days in office, "Obama realized that to achieve big social change you have to start early on," said Alter.

But Obama faces a host of problems, many of them beyond his control, said Alter. "He needs to get the economy back on track and reduce 9.6 percent employment but he doesn't have a good plan," he said. "In substantive terms," he added, "there's not much they [Democrats] can do."

Obama has also suffered by surrounding himself with a small circle of Clinton-era advisors, said Alter. "There has been a lack of creativity, the policies are a lot less ventilated and they missed some opportunities to reduce unemployment," said Alter.

For all the brilliance that Obama displayed on the presidential campaign trail, his political communication skills are surprisingly deficient, Alter said. "He has problems framing his [political] message and has this disdain for sound bites," he said. "He understood that better going into the campaign, with his 'Yes we can,' slogan. Sometimes he's too much of a professor in chief for his own good."

In particular, added Alter, "Obama did a terrible job of telling the people that the stimulus money was paid back by the banks—with interest. Nobody knows this—and that's what fuels the Tea Party." Similarly, "the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy has been very poorly explained," said Alter. "A lot of people think it's something Obama can do with a stroke of the pen, just as [President] Truman desegregated the armed forces with a stroke of the pen, but that's not the case."

In response to a question from a member of the audience, who identified herself as an "independent" voter, about when Obama and his fellow Democrats would start setting their own agenda instead of responding to the agenda set by their Republican rivals, Alter said he didn't think Republicans necessarily framed the political agenda. Health care, for example, was a program that Obama set, Alter noted.

"On cable news, Democrats are often on the defensive—Republicans are just better at the cut and thrust of politics," he said. "But a lot of that has to do with what I call the 'flight from facts' and it's one of the reasons why our politics has become a lot more complex."

This month's Republican victories in both the Senate and the House of Representatives may have raised fears of an irreversible setback for the Democrats, but "I don't think the losses are crippling to his [Obama's] agenda," Alter said. On the contrary, Obama could achieve much in certain areas such as education, job creation through small businesses, and possibly energy legislation, said Alter. This is all the more likely because "the Republican bumper sticker—'No'—is no longer good enough for them," added Alter. "Even obstructionists have to deliver when they get elected."

The lecture room in Johnson Hall where Alter gave his talk was packed with students and faculty. "I found it interesting that he said he intended the book to be a second draft of history—journalism being the first," said Alexa Damis-Wulff, a senior majoring in English. "It's an interesting premise I hadn't heard before."