A question of first principles

Jacob Weisberg has a valuable and insightful criticism of what I believe is an admirable and thoughtful quality on the part of President Obama: his grounded sense of pragmatism on questions of governance.

Obama's Big-Picture Problem

"In 2009, looking out over the largest crowd ever assembled in Washington, D.C., Barack Obama framed the issue in terms of simple efficacy. 'The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified,' he said. 'Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.'

This view is in keeping with Obama's non-ideological approach to politics. To most of those listening, it came across as an expression of our new president's unsentimental good sense. Yet on rereading the speech in the less euphoric light of the next day, that passage seemed insufficient as a governing philosophy. "Whatever works' is less a vision of the public sector's proper role than a placeholder for someone who has yet to figure out what he thinks that role should be.

Obama's pragmatic liberalism risks blurring execution with intention, means with ends. To take his illustrations, it is either up to the commonweal to provide a minimum income to retired people, to offer health insurance to everybody and to increase income equality—or it isn't. Most liberals would say these are legitimate responsibilities of government. Most conservatives would argue they aren't. On income security for the elderly, we've had a social consensus since the New Deal. On health care, a consensus may be emerging after decades of national ambivalence. When it comes to growing income inequality, a newer problem, there is no consensus. But Obama must decide what government's goals are before considering the subordinate questions of what works and how much we can afford.

Obama's vagueness about the federal role comes at a moment when clarity is especially needed. Our government is about to become bigger, more powerful and more expensive in order to deal with a sprawling economic crisis. Washington will take on responsibilities it hasn't shouldered in 75 years, such as directly alleviating unemployment and perhaps nationalizing banks. Many who would ordinarily reject such interventions on principle can justify them as misery relief, Keynesian stimulus or emergency management. But some see in the expansion something further-reaching—a redefinition of the government's relationship to markets transcending the current crisis.

A president facing this situation needs to know what's temporary and what's permanent, if only because of the tendency for the one to become the other. Urgent measures are liable to stick around long after the precipitating emergency is passed. There aren't many American homes left without electricity, but we retain a renamed version of the Rural Electrification Administration, a program created by Franklin Roosevelt as part of the New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933 to modernize a region of the country still afflicted by malaria, remains with us as well. Expanding government is easy, shrinking it nearly impossible.

On the broader question of what Washington should and shouldn't do, Obama remains hard to read. He inclines simultaneously toward activist government and limited government, which is a tension, though not a contradiction. He favors universal health coverage, but without government taking direct responsibility for it. He is poised to propose cutbacks in our most expensive entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, to ensure their survival. Language elsewhere in his Inaugural Address suggests that he sees government as a guarantor of opportunity rather than a provider of benefits, more Clinton's way than LBJ's.

But as he navigates the crisis, Obama would do well to figure out what he thinks about the fundamental question of government's responsibilities. He might begin by pondering some words of his role model, Abraham Lincoln, who in 1854 wrote, 'The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.' Obama's test of practicality comes after Lincoln's test of principle."

It is a wise observation for what looks, at this point, like equally wise, if ever imperfect, leadership from our new President.

I have some suggestions for the new President. I'm sure many people do.

The test of leadership that Barack Obama is likely to pass, I believe, is will he listen with an open heart and an open mind?

That is the test for all Americans, right now. It is the test of our faith in our liberal values, our independent consciences, and ourselves.

And it is a test that, every day, I grow more confident that we will pass.