Is Obama's Agenda Overloaded?
Distracted president deals with war, health care, swine flu and more.
Sept. 21, 2009— -- On five Sunday talk shows, Barack Obama has perhaps appeared before the American people more often than any modern president at this point in his term -- by some estimates, three times as much as his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
The media blitz also included stints on Jay Leno and The David Letterman Show on Monday.
"My calculation is that, at the end of today, the president will have appeared, in terms of national print and broadcast media, about 124 times, up to this point in his term," Robert Reich, co-founder of The American Prospect and former labor secretary in the Clinton administration.
But in all this zeal to reach the American public, Obama's ability to articulate his wide-reaching agenda pushes some analysts to ask if he has overloaded his political plate.
The president who promised change has a super agenda: health care, the economy, Afghanistan, the European missile defense system, the Middle East and climate change, not to mention issues of racism and a swine flu pandemic.
Media overexposure, say some, is the least of his problems.
"Most people say you have to break some eggs to get an omelet, but with Obama, the eggs are broken and the omelet is still far from made," said presidential historian and ABC News consultant Richard Norton Smith.
"To some degree we are in uncharted water," he told ABCNews.com. "History suggests that particularly in hard times, it becomes more difficult for a president to implement so ambitious an agenda."
In the inevitable comparisons to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which brought seismic change to American government after three years of the Great Depression, Obama's presidency is unique.
"Roosevelt had three years of economic despair to capitalize on," said Smith. "He was able to tap into the anger."
Obama, on the other hand, worked closely with the Bush administration in its final months to bail out the banking system.
"Obama is paying the price for being responsible," said Smith. "It's really not much of a rallying cry under the slogan, 'It could have been worse.'"
Frustration with Obama's health care agenda mounted last week, as he deflected former President Jimmy Carter's charges that those angered by the president's attempt at reform were "racist."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lip quivered when she wondered aloud if violence could ensue, remembering the slaying of gay activist Harvey Milk in San Francisco in 1978.
"Mrs. Pelosi had a point," said Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who served as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
"Things get high," she said on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, "It's always good to cool things down. But, essentially, what we have here is a very new president. He's only been here for 10 months. He is a young man. He didn't have deep, long, profound experience."
Noonan suggested that important issues are being clouded because Obama's ambitious agenda appears all over the map.
"He is attempting right now to change, what is it, 17 percent, 18 percent of the GNP of the United States of America, changing how it works, health care," she said. "But on top of that, people are thinking about -- in America -- the economy, unemployment, war and peace, two wars that are going."
"This president, who is new and young, comes along and says, "Oh, that's not the issue. The issue is health care." It seems not like a program, but a non sequitur," Noonan said.
Obama admitted in a Sunday interview with ABC News that he needs to do a better job of communicating his vision for health care reform and said the popular uproar had been "humbling."
"I think there have been times where I have said I've got to step up my game in terms of talking to the American people about issues like health care," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos, who asked if the president had "lost control" of the debate.
"Well, not so much lost control, but where I've said to myself, somehow I'm not breaking through," Obama responded.
Noonan said most modern presidents overdo it on the media circuit.
"They get their face in your face every day, all the time," she said. "It's boorish, and it makes people not lean towards you, but lean away from you, no matter what the merits of the issue."
But Reich, her co-panelist on the ABC round table, disagreed, saying that "the face that we see is one of dignity and gravitas and utter reasonableness.
"He is taking the initiative," said Reich. "He knows that if there's any lull right now, his opponents are going to jump into that lull. And it's very important that he educate the public about what's going on."
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