President Obama is under water. His approval in the polls is low and sinking, his signature initiative is staggering from a combination of incompetence and sabotage, his foreign policy is a jumble. Congress is a Bermuda Triangle where the most elementary White House business disappears. The public is numbed and disgusted. Allies are theatrically furious about eavesdropping. Put it this way:
When the water-cooler buzz in Washington is focused on Obama's near-death experience in last year's campaign debates, it's pretty clear he is not setting the agenda.
I have a few suggestions for how Obama might lift his presidency up from the bottom. The to-do list that follows consists of ideas that are worth doing on the merits and advantageous on the politics. Most of them are familiar, because this is a time to revive the best features of a stalled presidency, not to launch grand new initiatives. It's not that I want the president to think small; by all means, address the threat of climate catastrophe and push ahead on early childhood education. But he needs to get a few wins on the scoreboard. I invite readers to post their own suggestions in the comments section.
The first job is obvious, not least to the president. The bungling of the health care rollout was a humiliation for an administration whose campaign wizards famously tamed the social network in 2012. It has given Republicans license to feign indignation even as they do their best to undermine the new program. It has distracted the press from both the success stories (like Kentucky, where the rollout worked the way it was supposed to) and the episodes of Republican mischief (like Georgia, where the state blocked the hiring of "navigators" to help applicants through the enrollment process). I have no doubt that the administration will get the system working and that the program will ultimately prove popular. But the longer it takes, the more the president squanders the already meager public confidence that he can do anything right.
If after a few more weeks the assembled experts are still struggling to make the website work, maybe it's time to redeploy some techies from the National Security Agency.
Which brings me to...
Fire James Clapper.
Dismissing Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is not a new idea. Fred Kaplan of Slate suggested it in June, after Clapper lied to Congress about the N.S.A.'s data-mining. George Shultz, the former secretary state who belongs on any list of great living statesmen, called for it in September. ("I don't know how the guy who's in charge of national intelligence, Clapper, is still there," Shultz told a World Affairs Council audience. "He lied!") Better late than never. Obama should fire him not just because he lied, but also because Clapper has cast himself as the defender of the status quo, the apologist for excess. He seems to think what our government does is none of our business.
The president should draft someone widely viewed as tough-minded, clear-thinking and credible. I'd bring back Robert Gates, who, having run both the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, has the stature and the technical chops, and has shown he can run a gigantic enterprise without becoming a captive of it.
With a change of leadership should come systemic reform to make the spy agencies more accountable. Of the various options I've read, my favorite is Max Frankel's idea of creating a specialized court with the expertise to watch over the intelligence agencies and enough transparency to inspire public confidence. The president should make that idea his own.
Double down on immigration reform.
Comprehensive immigration reform is both the right thing to do and a winning issue politically. A good, bipartisan bill has passed the Senate, with enhanced border security, a more sensible legal immigration regimen, safeguards against employers who cheat and legalization for many of the 11 million who live in the shadows. This sensible reform is trapped in the House by the crossfire within the Republican Party between those who would like to put out a welcome mat for Hispanic voters and those, including the former profile in courage Marco Rubio, who are cowed by the wrath of their base.
It's conceivable that some House Republicans will take heart from the experience of New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, who embraced humane reforms and won half of the Hispanic vote in his re-election landslide last Tuesday.
But even if the chances of success are small, the more the White House presses the issue, the more it isolates the ideologues from the pragmatists, and the more it separates the right wing from business donors.
As Paul Taylor, who follows immigration for Pew Research, puts it: "It's better politics if the president wins, but it's still good politics if he loses."
Rebalance foreign policy.
For years the administration has talked of "rebalancing" our military strategy to address an increasingly assertive China. The Pentagon, liberated from Iraq and drawing down in Afghanistan, has taken some modest steps in this direction, deploying more of the Navy to Asia, devoting more resources to China's space and cyber threats. But our rivalry with China is not, and should never be, primarily military. We need to compete on the fields of economics and diplomacy. Unfortunately the civilian custodians of our foreign policy have been bogged down in the Middle East, a region that matters a lot, but not as much as it did when we were more dependent on imported oil.
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