Obama’s era of Big Things is over

The first long chapter of Barack Obama’s presidency came to an end last week when the Senate finally passed its sweeping financial regulation bill. Obama’s first 18 months in office produced historic legislation, but that era of Big Things is now over.

The mandate the president could claim after taking 29 states in the election and scoring an astonishing 69% approval rating in the Gallup Poll is mostly spent. His party’s majority in Congress, already eroding, is about to get much smaller. From now on, Obama’s presidency must focus on more modest goals — and survival.

That’s not to downplay his accomplishments up to now. The $787-billion economic stimulus package, the enactment of a national health insurance law (a goal Democrats had sought without success since 1948) and last week’s Wall Street reforms already rank Obama with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson as a president who fundamentally reshaped the federal government.

Paradoxically, though, those achievements now threaten to sink his presidency — in part because he has focused more on getting big legislation passed than on the more mundane jobs of implementing and explaining what he’s done.

Now he has no choice. His Democratic allies in Congress, their majorities at risk in an election only 107 days away, are begging for a break from Big Things and more attention to small ones, like unemployment insurance and campaign fundraising. An energy bill, if Obama gets one, will be far smaller than what he had hoped for. An immigration bill is utterly out of reach (although it was always on Obama’s back burner, way behind healthcare and energy). And if this year’s Congress has turned skittish, next year’s — after inevitable Republican gains in November — could be positively hostile.

“He has used up his prime period of presidential power,” said Fred I. Greenstein of Princeton University, a scholar of the presidency. “Now he’s in a holding pattern.”

Why has Obama fallen so abruptly back to Earth? His top strategist, David Axelrod, says it was predictable: No president’s popularity can stay at 69% once he begins making decisions, because every choice gives his opponents a new target. Nor can any president satisfy the yearnings of his most ardent supporters; in the 1980s, conservatives complained that Ronald Reagan had turned into a pragmatic compromiser, just as Obama’s liberal base agonizes today.

And no president can escape public frustration over a long recession, even if it predated his tenure. Obama and his aides take comfort in the fact that his standing in public opinion surveys is actually better than Reagan’s at the same point in his recession-wracked first term — and Reagan won reelection by a landslide two years later.

Still, the numbers in a CBS Poll last week were daunting. Obama’s overall job approval rating was 44%, respectable for a recession; but 74% of respondents said they did not believe his stimulus package had helped the economy at all, and more than half, 52%, said the president wasn’t spending enough time on the problem.

Those are frustrating sentiments to White House aides who have pushed the president to visit more factory floors and construction job sites. They planned for Obama to focus almost solely on jobs and the economy this year — but then the healthcare bill didn’t pass until March and the gulf oil spill ate most of May and June.

Even without those crises, it is clear the president prefers to spend his time on big, ambitious measures over small, kitchen-table problems. He has sent Vice President Joe Biden to tour construction sites where economic stimulus money is being spent the old-fashioned way, but he himself visits alternative energy projects — a weighty long-range priority rather than just the short-term problem of enduring the recession.

Now, circumstances will give Obama no choice. He had 18 months to find the limits of audacity. For the next 15 weeks, he must try to reignite the spark he found in his 2008 presidential campaign, only this time on behalf of congressional candidates less photogenic than he is, and against a ferocious economic headwind.

And what will he do in the two years after election day?

Aides say there’s still a big agenda: education reform, which could be an opportunity for bipartisan legislation. More work on energy policy, which will be at most half-done this year. Perhaps most important, a battle over how to reduce the deficit after the recession is over.

But none of those match the vaulting goals of the first 18 months. And it’s unlikely that Congress will have a workable Democratic majority under any circumstances; the prospects for legislative gridlock are good. All of which means Obama will have to find more ways to govern by executive order, addressing problems incrementally rather than with sweeping change.

And that raises a question: The president has shown that he knows how to swing for the fences. But can he also play small ball?

Last week, Obama sat down with Bill Clinton. Officially, the meeting was to enlist Clinton’s help in promoting job programs in the private sector. But let’s hope the president was wise enough to ask for broader political advice as well.

When Clinton found his attempts to pass Big Things blocked by Republicans, he responded with a blizzard of voter-pleasing mini-measures, from funding for police officers to regulations allowing uniforms in public schools — precisely the kind of thing Obama needs to do now.

The president and his ambitious agenda are coming back to Earth, and just in time. He has accomplished great things; now he needs to recover from them.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com