Later may not be so easy. Obama is having trouble with his centrist Democrats, who are not sold on his strategy of spending his way out of the recession while pushing ahead with health and education reform.
Senator Kent Conrad, chairman of the budget committee, has said there aren’t enough votes to pass Obama’s budget with its $1.7 trillion deficit and $634bn for health reform. “Some of us have a real pause about the notion of putting substantially more money into the healthcare system,” he warns.
Then there are the Democratic conservatives, the 49 congressmen who represent districts that voted for McCain last November. Some of them voted against the $410bn spending package for this fiscal year and Obama faces another revolt over the plan to let Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy expire next year. The heart of the resistance will be in Arizona, where Democrats Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords dread the prospect of seeking re-election at the same time and in the same state as John McCain.
Congress has been emboldened by the way its approval ratings are rising while Obama’s have fallen. The latest Gallup poll found that Congress, whose approval ratings were a lowly 19 per cent in January, are now at 39 per cent, their highest in years.
This piece is also published in the April edition of Prospect, available from 26th March 2009.