Obama Arrives Home to New Reality

SEOUL (By Carol E. Lee, Politico) November 15, 2010 ― The trip began with policy successes and a glowing reception, welcome respite for a president fresh off of a stinging political defeat. But the terrain got thornier as Barack Obama made his way across Asia.

Dancing with schoolchildren in Mumbai and reconnecting with a piece of his childhood in Jakarta gave way to a setback on a free trade deal in Seoul and tense confrontations from his counterparts about American leadership on the global economy. By the time he headed to his last stop – a gathering of world leaders in Japan – Obama was on the defensive and frustrated with how he was being portrayed.

“What about the compliments?” the president told reporters when asked what criticisms he heard during his conversations with other heads of state.

Unfortunately for Obama, it doesn’t get easier from here. The worst of his nine days in Asia is better than the new reality in Washington he faces when he returned home.

He has to figure out what to do about tax cut issues the Democratic-controlled Congress punted before the midterm elections, and how to find agreement in a divided Congress on how to fund the government through next September. He meets Thursday for the first time with newly emboldened Republican congressional leaders, whom he’ll host for dinner at the White House.

Then he’s back overseas, flying to Portugal on Thursday night to face world leaders on another contentious topic: the war in Afghanistan. Obama meets with NATO allies as their support for the war is wearing thin and ahead of his own review in December of his war strategy.

Understandably, he might wish he were back in India, where he could ruminate about how he incorporates the values of Gandhi into his day-to-day life and accept compliments from fans about what an honor it was to merely be in his presence.

In Washington, of course, some of the president’s new reality is the old reality.

Nancy Pelosi will likely still be the leader of House Democrats and Harry Reid will still be in charge in the Senate. Beyond the political symbolism the Obama-Reid-Pelosi triumvirate has for voters outside the Beltway, the dynamic presents potential problems for the president.

Pelosi in particular may now be more of an obstacle than the “outstanding partner” Obama dubbed her on Friday. Her supporters in Congress want her to stand up to the president to protect the liberal causes they worry he’ll forsake in the interest of getting re-elected.

It’s a potentially fraught scenario for Obama because while he showed on his Asia trip that he still can make a strong personal connection and use his celebrity cachet as he did in India and Indonesia, his time overseas also underscored the trouble he’s having with the nitty-gritty of governing.

In some ways, the arc of Obama’s nine-day trip followed the pattern of his presidency.

In the beginning, fanfare and high expectations: Obama, who was accompanied in India and Indonesia by first lady Michelle Obama, surveyed environmental projects at a Mumbai high school and held a town hall with college students. “It’s an absolute honor to hear you, and I must say this, that one day I hope I be half as good as a leader as you are today,” a questioner told him during the event at St. Xavier College.

Obama also achieved an expansion of U.S. exports to India – part of his goal of doubling exports in five years – and he announced deals for U.S. companies that he said would create thousands of American jobs. It was an early victory for his effort to cast the trip as a mission to tackle the 9.6 percent unemployment rate back home.

In Indonesia, where Obama lived for several years as a child, he was enveloped in a warm homecoming that mixed personal touches – a gold medal of honor for his late mother – with official business, including deepening ties with Jakarta through several billion dollars in new U.S. aid.

The president’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, cast the India and Indonesia stops in monumental terms.

“I think when historians look back on the trip to India and Indonesia,” Donilon told reporters in Yokohama, “it will be one of those seminal moments, one of those iconic moments in the relationship between countries when historians look back on it.”

But as the trip wore on, Obama had to navigate several minefields – a shrill response from the German finance minister and criticism from China over American economic policy, a setback in his renewed efforts for Middle East peace, and, perhaps most disappointingly, an impasse on a trade deal with South Korea. Many had expected Obama to reach a renewed pact with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak by the time they met.

Instead, Obama had to step to the podium in Seoul and explain he needed more time because the South Koreans wouldn’t budge on easing restrictions on American cars. Adding insult to the undesirable outcome, Lee put Obama on the spot during their joint press conference when he was asked about concerns over U.S. fiscal policy.

“I think that kind of question should be asked to me when President Obama is not standing right next to me,” Lee, a former head of Hyundai, replied.

Obama cracked a smile. But it was a moment hardly imaginable a year ago.

“The first time he went around the world, everybody wanted to just touch the hem of his suit or something,” Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, said of Obama. “They would throw Nobel Prizes at him before he did anything. So sure, he’s come back to reality. And the world recognizes that as well.”

Still, the trip did not end with a diplomatic setback the equivalent of the mid-term election defeat that has redefined his presidency. And Obama remains more popular abroad than his predecessor, George W. Bush, a point top White House officials made several times in Yokohama.

The president’s aides believe Obama’s personal outreach in Asia had the most value.

“He spoke to over a billion people in India and Indonesia,” Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told reporters in Yokohama. “And part of what captivated them was his biography. In Indonesia, the personal connection he has with the place kind of validated our relationship in a way that we’ve never had before. In India, if you look at the coverage, the connection of the president on that second day to young people in India is part of what really made this such a successful visit. Similarly, the connection that, frankly, they just draw from Gandhi to the civil rights movement to the president is something that had huge resonance.”

But even the president acknowledged the post-honeymoon phase of his world travels.

“When I first came into office, people might have been interested in more photo ops because there had been a lot of hoopla surrounding my election,” he said at a news conference in Seoul. But now, he said, he had formed relationships with several key leaders, including those who were pushing back against his proposals.

“It’s not just a function of personal charm,” Obama said. “It’s a function of countries’ interests and seeing if we can work through to align them.”

The same framework could be applied to his relationships in Congress in the wake of the devastating midterm elections. Obama had only been overseas for a day when a student in Mumbai asked him about the midterm elections. The result, Obama replied, “requires me to make some midcourse corrections and adjustments.”

The only senior White House staffers on Obama’s trip were Donilon, press secretary Robert Gibbs, and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett. The president’s top political aides, David Axelrod and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, stayed in Washington to deal with the aftermath of the election, but it’s not as if the subject didn’t come up on the trip.

In Seoul, Obama faced a barrage of questions about politics back home.

He gave a tacit endorsement of Pelosi’s bid for leadership in the new Congress. He criticized Democrats for speaking out against a preliminary proposal by the chairmen of his bipartisan deficit commission. And he was forced to knock down a report that Axelrod said he’d decided on a compromise with Republicans over the Bush tax cuts.

“It would be fiscally irresponsible for us to permanently extend the high end tax cuts,” Obama said during a news conference at the end of the G-20 summit. “I think that would be a mistake, particularly when we’ve got our Republican friends saying their number one priority is making sure we deal with our debt and deficit.”

More than anything, however, Obama was asked about whether his political problems at home made him weaker abroad. That narrative began to build when Obama failed to achieve the trade deal with South Korea. The president complained several times during his news conference in Seoul about the U.S. media’s coverage of the G-20 summit, saying reporters were searching for drama.

The strains continued to show in Yokohama. When Obama learned a reporter who thanked him after his meeting with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was a member of the Australian press, he quipped, “I knew it must have been an Australian because my folks never say thank you.”

The remark prompted White House reporters in the room to give him some sing-songy gratitude, saying in unison with a touch of sarcasm, “Thank you, Mr. President.”