What can a president do in 100 days? Not much, really. Chiefly this: establish a mood. Set a tone. Send signals about how he envisions both state and nation.
These, of course, are different things. The state is the government. Barack Obama wants a larger and more activist state. This much is obvious. He will get there. How much more activist no one yet knows. This will depend largely on Congress.
Last week there was a quiet but potentially earth-shaking development in this arena. The Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders came to an agreement saying that if a healthcare bill isn't passed by 15 October, they will then pursue healthcare through the process known on Capitol Hill as reconciliation.
In this usage, the word has little to do with its everyday meaning (it derives from a complex legislative process whereby different budget proposals and their dollar amounts are ultimately "reconciled" with each other and prepared for final passage).
But the important point is this. Under reconciliation, bills can pass the Senate with a simple majority of 51 rather than the super-majority of 60 that's needed for most legislation. Arlen Specter's switch yesterday to the Democrats makes 60 more gettable for Obama, but still not a sure thing. So operating under this procedure means that Obama won't have to worry about getting a single Republican vote and can even lose a few centrist Democratic ones and still pass major healthcare legislation.
The plan appears to be to try to pass a bill conventionally, with some GOP input, before the deadline. But if that fails, reconciliation will be on the table. It's a nice poker move. You give me zero votes (the House of Representatives) or maybe three (the Senate)? Fine. I'll pass something in a way that doesn't depend on your votes. Republicans are crying foul, and to some extent understandably, because a little bit of sleight of hand is required to write a healthcare bill that meets the reconciliation criteria.
But we have these things called elections. One side won, and another side lost. The winners can set the rules. And yes, I'd be saying the same thing – grudgingly rather than happily, I admit, but I'd be saying it – if the other team had won.
I dwell on healthcare because it is the last great piece of unfinished business for us unrepentant statists. You, my British friends, took care of this 50 years with the help of the great Mr Attlee. We tried it then – we've tried it about six or seven times going back nearly a century – but the doctors' and insurers' lobbies have beaten it back every time. If Obama passes healthcare and absolutely nothing else, he will even then go down in history as an important president – the man who filled in the last piece of the New Deal puzzle.
So that's state. And what about nation? The nation is the people – our common polity and our civic weal and all that highfalutin stuff. What signals has Obama sent on this front?
George Bush and Dick Cheney wanted an infantile citizenry. In fact they didn't really want citizens, in the sense in which the word is used in political philosophy, at all. Especially after 9/11, they wanted wards of the state.
This is somewhat ironic, isn't it, since they were passionate anti-statists. But it's the case. They wanted Americans to be fearful and to need daddy's protection. Hence the red and orange terror alerts, the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric, Ari Fleischer's infamous admonition that people needed to watch what they said and did.
Fully engaged citizens have a say in their fate. Even in a democracy as sprawling and saturated in lucre as this one, a president can still send signals to people about the posture he wants them to assume. Bush and Cheney wanted people to need protection against evildoers – terrorists, mostly, but also tax-raisers and regulators and coastal elitists. This worked for them for a while. But Katrina exposed them as incompetent guardians, and after that the jig was up.
Obama wants people to be citizens. He wants them to play a role in shaping their own destiny. He's not trying to scare anybody. He couldn't anyway. That isn't his thing. He wants people to think. You can hear it in all his speeches – notably, to me, the mid-April Georgetown speech on the economy. He talks up to his audience and not down. He tries to clarify, but he does not try to simplify. He trusts that citizens can hold two concepts, even competing and contradictory ones, in their heads at one time.
The numbers don't lie. The people, committed conservatives excepted, like being treated as adults for a change.
In the realm of state, he'll have success, and he'll experience defeats. But in the realm of nation, even at this early juncture, we can already say that his greatest success is the change in tone. And his success is also ours.