Obama’s Priorities

OBAMA’S PRIORITIES….Peter Baker of the New York Times writes today about Barack Obama’s plans once he’s in office, which start with financial stimulus, an energy plan, healthcare reform, and several other items:

During the campaign, Mr. Obama identified many other priorities — withdrawing from Iraq and talks with Iran, tackling immigration and the issue of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and trade negotiations with the country’s North American neighbors.

At the same time, his team is tamping down expectations of instant action by discouraging talk of a 100-day program.

That’s music to my ears. Allowing the press to implicitly compare everything you do with FDR’s first months in office is a guaranteed way to look like a failure. Besides, while it’s true that honeymoons don’t last forever, there’s no reason they can’t last longer than a hundred days, especially when you have substantial congressional majorities working with you. Luckily, Obama seems to understand this:

Mr. Obama’s transition advisers studied how Presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan and Clinton used their first months. The lesson many drew was that even if various agencies moved forward in many directions, a new president must husband his time, energy and political capital for three dominant priorities at most. Several Obama advisers cited Reagan, who concentrated his early efforts on pushing through major tax cuts and increased military spending.

….In an interview on CNN days before the election, he explicitly ranked his priorities, starting with an economic recovery package that would include middle-class tax relief. His second priority, he said, would be energy; third, health care; fourth, tax restructuring; and fifth, education.

Those priorities sound about right to me. Obviously dealing with the economy is Job 1, but energy and healthcare were the main domestic policy items Obama campaigned on and he has a pretty clear mandate to act on them. (Unlike, say, 2004, when Bush barely mentioned Social Security during the campaign and then pretended he had a mandate to privatize the system. Didn’t work out so well for him.) Add Iraq to the mix on the foreign policy side and Obama has a pretty full plate of major policy initiatives for his first year. Add in the usual slew of more modest measures, and we could be in pretty good shape by the end of 2009.

Assuming, of course, that congressional Dems have learned their lesson from 1993 and can put their egos in check enough to actually take some guidance from the guy in the White House. Here’s hoping.