Obama is Over

When a president frames his speech around a call
for a “year of action,” you can safely bet that the next 12 months
will be as action-packed as an afternoon nap. The subtext of last
night’s State of the Union address was that Obama’s presidency is
not just frustrated but tired; it’s not only that he can’t do much,
thanks to Republicans in Congress, it’s that he has so few
remaining ideas about what to do. (Last night’s most significant
new ideas was a vaguely explained
government-backed retirement savings program.)

Five years in, the Obama presidency has already been exhausted.
And so Obama plans to ride it out, propping up the laws he has
already passed, doing his best to stop Democrats from losing too
many seats in 2014, and tweaking policies through executive action
where he can. Yes, there will still be controversies surrounding
his administration, and yes, the president will still be the center
of considerable attention and controversy from both fans in
critics—but mostly for what he’s already done, not what he wants to
do. He’ll be in office for another three years, but he’s already
finished. Obama is over.

Meanwhile, as the Obama presidency grows stale, it’s the once
agenda-less Republicans and their conservative allies who are busy
generating fresh new ideas. Obama has talked broadly about tax
reform for years, but it’s Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) who
recently put forth a big plan to overhaul the tax code. Obama last
night challenged Republicans who oppose Obamacare to present some
kind of alternative—but failed to acknowledge the three GOP
Senators (Coburn, Hatch, and Burr) who did so just this week. Rep.
Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Marco Rubio have spent the last month
talking up policies to address poverty. Lee and Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Ky.) are amongst the nation’s most aggressive champions of
criminal justice reform. Obama’s State of the Union rehashed old,
flawed arguments about health care and education; Sen. Lee’s

response to the president’s address highlighted a slew of
Republican reform ideas from transportation to education to
energy.

Meanwhile, small but influential journals like National Affairs provide
a forum for right of center policy wonks to work through their
ideas in detail, looking at both what to do and how to do it. The
evidence suggests that at least some Republican politicians are
listening.

You can see tensions, too. There’s a push and pull at work,
between technocratic conservatism and revivalist libertarianism,
between those who are more concerned with, say, spending taxpayer
money well and those more concerned with spending money less,
between the party’s individualistic impulses and its communalist
concerns. There’s still plenty left to work out.

But this is how a party develops an agenda. Not overnight, with
a dictum from the top or the selection of a presidential candidate,
but over time, through iteration and experimentation, and through a
conversation with itself—and eventually with its critics as well.
For too long, the right has lacked the infrastructure to start this
conversation and the political will to carry it on. Its agenda has
been opposition, and little else. But that’s changing, in part
because of the efforts of conservative reformers, and in part
because the Obama agenda is so clearly nearing its end.

Not all of these Republican ideas are fully formed. Not all of
them are practical, or politically feasible. And not every
Republican is on board; party leadership is still far too hesitant
to engage with the right’s policy reformers. But Republicans are,
finally, talking about what to do. Obama is stuck talking about
what he’s already done.