Barack Obama’s honeymoon is over, says David Broder in The Washington Post. His critics have found their voices and many are uneasy. The “basic message” seems to be slow down and fix the economy before remaking the country, says The National Post. After just 50 days in office, Obama has not only pushed a $787bn stimulus package through Congress, but also crafted a budget, ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay, organised the departure of US troops from Iraq and begun the process of reforming healthcare and establishing a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gases. The list doesn’t stop there.
Criticism is coming from some unlikely quarters. Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who is an Obama supporter and adviser, told a CNBC audience on Monday that Obama has been confusing Americans with his “simultaneous campaigns on competing fronts”. Andrew Grove, a co-founder of Intel, urged the president to “rein in the chaos”. “Hopeful enthusiasm” has given way to “worry and frustration”, he writes in The Washington Post. We have gone through months of chaos “experimenting with ways to introduce stability into our financial system” and it’s now time to commit to a clear course of action. Until that has been achieved, healthcare, environmental policies and so on should be left well alone.
The priority is to heal the banks and allow the markets to clear, says Thomas Friedman in the International Herald Tribune. Failed companies or homeowners should go bankrupt, dead capital should be “unlocked and reapplied to thriving entities”. But the problem is that if you let the market clear away the likes of AIG, Citigroup and General Motors, we “could all be wiped out”. To avoid this the president needs to make some bold and politically unpalatable decisions, which may require him to look the American people in the eye and explain that “fairness is not on the menu any more”. For example, the government could persuade private equity groups to bid for the toxic assets crippling major banks by guaranteeing they will not lose. It would strike many as another “Wall Street giveaway”, but tough decisions must be made.
There’s been plenty of unfairness already and it hasn’t gone down well, says Jim Puzzanghera in the Los Angeles Times. Witness the outrage over the bonus payments made last week to AIG employees who created the risky financial instruments that were responsible for bringing the insurer to its knees. Obama joined the condemnation, but was he “jumping on the bandwagon” to distract attention from his own policy failings, just as Gordon Brown did with Sir Fred Goodwin? asks Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. There are concerns that Obama is simply spraying money around, using as much as $400bn of the stimulus to “buy off various Democratic constituencies”, granting funding to pet projects of congressmen whose votes were required to get the package through and bailing out firms that should have gone under. Obama is still popular, but his initial response to the global calamity has “not inspired popularity’s more sober older brother, confidence”. He needs to sort out the economy fast, but it is hard to see what the solution will be.