Has Obama quit already?

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Has Obama quit already?

The Week – 7 hrs ago

Judging by his plans for job creation and deficit reduction, the president has

given up on policy accomplishments in favor of playing politics

The last few weeks of polling data have been so bad for Barack Obama that

pundits have begun speculating whether the president might simply decide not to

run for a second term in 2012. Still, many question whether Obama could truly

bring himself to walk away from the world's most powerful executive position,

even if it became clear that he couldn't win in 2012 — and that his presence on

the ticket might damage Democrats running in Senate and House races below him on

the ticket.

However, the real question is whether Obama has essentially quit already.

Obama has offered two major proposals this month in an attempt to change the

narrative, to reverse the perception that his presidency is floundering with the

poor economy. The first proposal deals with job creation, which is how most

Americans gauge economic success. The president had not offered any new thoughts

on job creation since the first stimulus package, instead issuing a series of

predictions that massive job creation was just around the corner. Vice President

Joe Biden spent the spring of 2010 talking about a " Summer of Recovery " that

never arrived, and by the summer of 2011, job creation stopped entirely — with

zero net jobs created in August.

That put pressure on the president to come up with a new plan, and the White

House started generating plenty of buzz by hyping Obama's work in August for a

new plan in September. They raised expectations for a game-changer by insisting

on unveiling the plan at a joint session of Congress. Instead of offering a new

plan, however, Obama gave an ambiguous sketch of a plan. It took the White House

several more days to actually deliver the proposal to Capitol Hill, along with

its $447 billion price tag.

The president has more than a year to go before the next election, but Obama has

stopped governing and has shifted entirely to campaign mode.

The plan itself broke no new ground. Indeed, it closely resembles the 2009

stimulus bill, with its mix of infrastructure spending, temporary tax breaks,

and another round of bailouts for states. But if the rehashed jobs plan was a

passive disappointment, Obama's new deficit reduction plan is an aggressive

partisan attack — the very kind that Obama blasted in his joint-session speech

earlier in the month. Obama warned his political opponents that voters wouldn't

wait for an election 14 months away to deliver solutions, and that Democrats and

Republicans had to work together now to solve the big problems facing the

nation:

" Already, we're seeing the same old press releases and tweets flying back and

forth. Already, the media has proclaimed that it's impossible to bridge our

differences. And maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so

great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box. But know this: The next

election is 14 months away. And the people who sent us here — the people who

hired us to work for them — they don't have the luxury of waiting 14 months. "

Instead of working with Republicans to craft a deficit-reduction plan that could

pass Congress, Obama instead filled his with tax hikes that even his own party

rejected in 2009 and 2010 in the effort to fund Obama's signature health-care

overhaul bill. Our colleague Frum calls it a " stunt " that would derail

economic growth, if it ever had a prayer of passing the House. Democratic

strategist Mark Penn wonders at The Huffington Post why Obama would want to turn

himself into another Walter Mondale — and also why Obama passed on the

opportunity to work on comprehensive tax reform with Republicans rather than get

stuck in " the thicket of class warfare. " Why not work on co-opting a big

Republican issue as Bill Clinton did with welfare reform, Penn asks, and seize

the mantle of leadership?

Penn wonders why Obama didn't think to work with House Republicans on deficit

reduction, but he might have asked why Obama didn't bother to work with Senate

Democrats on the jobs bill, either. The White House apparently forgot to consult

with its own allies in the upper chamber when writing the rerun of the 2009

stimulus bill, only to discover to their embarrassment that it won't pass the

Senate. At least six Senate Democrats have gone on the record in the media

expressing opposition to passing it in its current form, and not just

purple-state incumbents up for tough re-election fights (like Joe Manchin and

Casey), but also those in relatively safe seats like Tom Carper

(Delaware) and Barbara Mikulski (land). Even Dianne Feinstein in solid-blue

California talked to the media about her concerns over the cost and

effectiveness of Obama's plan.

Obama mailed in both proposals rather than engage in the hard work of

governance. If Obama had any interest in actually passing his deficit-reduction

plan, he would not have filled it with tax hikes that have floated around the

Beltway for years — and which both Republicans and Democrats have rejected in

the past. The jobs bill was even less creative than his approach to deficit

reduction, cribbed from a failed and costly exercise in central economic

control. Obama didn't bother to put much effort into either because he has no

intention of doing the hard work needed to accomplish actual deficit reduction

or improve the job-creation climate. The president has more than a year to go

before the next election, but Obama has stopped governing and has shifted

entirely to campaign mode. This is what it looks like when a president quits.