Ezra Klein Says; ‘It is ridiculous to declare Obama’s presidency ‘finished’”

Affordable Care Act health-care reform implementation. Federal Reserve appointments. Dodd-Frank financial regulation implementation. Environmental regulation–how and whether to control carbon dioxide emissions as a garden-variety pollutant under the Clean Air Act, and whether the Keystone pipeline is an environment minus (further entrenching the carbon economy) or an environmental plus (shifting us away from dirty coal). Finally–five years late, no thanks to Tim Geithner and Barack Obama’s appointments non-policies–using the Federal Housing Finance Administration to do what needs to be done to rebalance housing finance in the aftermath of a housing sector-based financial crisis, and with any luck use FHFA and the GSEs it regulates as tools of macroeconomic policy to ease the load on the Federal Reserve. (See Joe Gagnon.) Judiciary appointments. Turning promises that addressing inequality is job #1 into realities. And foreign policy–lots of foreign policy: climate, economic, democracy, and security.

There is an awful lot of policy to be done over the next three years. Virtually none of it, however, involves Senators preening for the cameras, or is of interest to non-quantitative reporters wanting to write “opinions of shape of earth differ” stories. Even following what will be going on will require digging down into federal administrative mechanisms, and reaching out to what is going on outside the Beltway…

Ezra Klein: It’s ridiculous to declare Obama’s presidency ‘finished’:

There’s an interesting dialogue going on between the New Republic’s Alec MacGillis and the New York Times’s Ross Douthat on whether any presidency–much less Barack Obama’s in the first year of his second term–can ever be declared “finished”. MacGillis says it’s absurd…. Douthat gives the assumption a bit more credence.

What Washington scribes tend to mean when they apply the shorthand term ‘finished’ to a presidency… somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 thumping [George W. Bush] passed over a crucial threshold where 1) he no longer had a hope in Hades of moving big-ticket legislation through Congress and 2) he no longer had a plausible path to recovering the public’s trust.

This is a time when it helps to think less about public opinion and more about the powers of the presidency…. A presidency is finished when it no longer has plausible mechanisms for achievement…. Congress is a closed mechanism for Obama. That has nothing to do with trust in Obama or the rollout of Obamacare. An overwhelming win in the 2012 election wasn’t enough for Obama to get a big budget deal with House Republicans. The GOP’s fear that it would become demographically irrelevant and Sen. Marco Rubio’s endorsement wasn’t enough for Obama to get an immigration reform bill past House Republicans. The Aurora and Newtown shootings weren’t enough for Obama to get a popular gun-control bill….

[Thus] a congressional loss in 2014 won’t have the same effect on the Obama administration that the 2006 loss had on the Bush administration…. The administrative mechanism, however, is much more powerful for Obama than it is for most second-term presidents…. He’s going to have plenty of opportunity to implement major laws….

A second term that defuses Iran’s nuclear threat, sets up a successful near-universal health-care system in the United States, re-regulates the financial sector and begins the work of pricing carbon is a pretty consequential second term…. Obama’s second term is really about making good on the promises of his first.

And:

Eric Alterman: Is Obamacare the End of Liberalism? Not So Much:

As Jonathan Bernstein notes, health care is re-emerging as a “normal issue.”… The Center for American Progress calculated that an average individual premium for a plan with relatively high out-of-pocket expenses in the insurance marketplaces is $3,900, about 16 percent lower than the $4,700 expected…. And yet this story–the one about possibly intermittent but steady progress toward the goal of giving all Americans access to health care–will not likely be the one driving the narrative in the mainstream media. Remember when John Boehner promised that the bill would “ruin our economy,” and Rick Santorum similarly predicting that it would “destroy the country?”… Joe Nocera likened its problems to “Obama’s Bay of Pigs”…. According to Ron Fournier, the rollout was both Obama’s Katrina and Iraq. Think, for a moment, about how many people died in those incidents….

In a rational political world, predictions such as these should discredit the likes of Krauthammer, Nocera, Fournier, and their fellow Chicken Little types in the minds of the editors who publish them. But, of course, they won’t. Pundits don’t ever face voters.