The President needs Congress

The significance of the separation of powers is to be highlighted in perfect Technicolor later today when President Obama appears before a joint session of Congress to make a speech that he hopes will save his healthcare reform proposals (well, promises since he hasn’t actually been very specific about what he wants).

Most people expect Obama to be happy with some sort of healthcare package passing, even if it doesn’t include a government backed plan to insure Americans currently without coverage.

Bronwen Maddox in the Times takes up the story:

“Will Barack Obama be a two-term president? We’ll be better able to judge by the end of tomorrow. His big speech to the nation, arguing for his prized healthcare reforms, is a test of whether he can convince the sceptical and placate the hostile.

It’s much tougher, say, than his June speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, where he was addressing an audience fluent in anti-US phrases, but grateful for any conciliation from a US president. Here, he faces conservatives who have taken advantage of the disarray of the Republican Party to promote, with passion, the notion that he is a socialist. The Democratic extremes, on the other hand, have been so intolerant of any compromise that they have almost given substance to that absurdity.

If Obama can be precise, and make quick, clear compromises on his wish list, then he will survive. Not just survive this week, but next year’s mid-term congressional elections, when, as things stand, Democrats are heading for a sharp rebuff.

Otherwise, he will stir the growing sense that he gives carefully calculated big speeches, particularly abroad, but ducks any difficult commitment, and that he is too left-wing, in the sense of favouring big government, for mainstream America. In that case, when he comes to run for re-election, there is no big speech that will turn his fortunes around.

Tomorrow’s speech matters more than any so far. In the $700 billion banking bailout, the $800 billion economic stimulus and the rescue of rusting car giants, he swept through eye-wateringly expensive policies on the sheer drama of the crisis. He doesn’t have that now.

This is also the first time he will be forced to say exactly what he wants; something that, so far, he has ducked. To a reckless degree, he has so far left the scripting of proposals to Congress.

His best course, surely, is to get something passed, even through great compromise, and build on it once the groups that feel most threatened by change realise they have not suffered. The test of whether he will make sacrifices is whether he ditches his hope of a state insurance plan to compete with private ones. It is unpopular with many voters, and has fuelled the “Obama is a socialist” attacks. Bizarre as those assaults are, the purchase they have won shows that Obama — and the Democratic-controlled Congress — are probably too far to the left of centre to be successful.

That would still leave him with two proposals he also cares about: subsidies to help poorer people to get coverage, and laws to stop insurers denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. This would protect some of the 47 million without any coverage. It would also allow people more easily to move jobs without fear of losing cover, a big inhibition in the US job market.

All of this raises the costs of US healthcare; already much higher than the country can afford. Obama flatly maintains that he aims to cut costs without having offered any way of doing so. That may have to wait until a further round of legislation, urgent though the need is. There are simply too many groups fearful of losing out to do it all at once.

Better to get a few reforms through, on an issue that has been the graveyard of politicians for years, than hold out for the ideal and lose it all — perhaps the White House in 2012 as well.”