US politics: Obama unbound

The US president left behind a string of controversies before heading overseas, announcing ambitious new targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, as well as freeing the Taliban prisoners who had been held without charge at Guantánamo Bay for more than 12 years.

With two politically fraught decisions, Mr Obama cemented the tone for the final two-and-half years of his presidency. Convinced he can transact little business with Congress, he is determined to use the power of his office whenever possible.

“He is going to do things the way he wants to do it. That is pretty much the attitude,” said William Daley, Mr Obama’s former chief of staff. “If you hesitate, and this is what a lot of people were critical of in his first few years – he was too cautious, too conservative, too unwilling to take a little risk – now I think that burden is off him.”

The congressional midterm elections in November have only injected greater urgency into the US president’s timetable. The Republicans are in pole position to gain control of the Senate, and thus both chambers of Congress, and are prepared to make his final two years in office a misery.

“He recognises the clock is ticking – he has to do things this way or face the fact that he may get nothing done at all,” said Tom Daschle, a former Democratic Senate leader who stays in close touch with the White House.

Mr Obama’s decisive actions have helped curtail a period of panic, frustration and drift in the White House, which has struggled to recover from last year’s disastrous launch of the president’s signature health policy. But in different ways, the two announcements also underlined the occasional strengths and enduring weaknesses of his administration.

Republicans, for whom the science of climate change has been swept aside by the cause’s identification with big government and expanding regulation, hate the EPA rule. Democrats from energy-rich states are also unhappy.

In the knowledge that the distant potential costs of global warming have always been a hard sell, the administration has tried to head off the objections to the policy by reshaping the debate over the past year.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to cut carbon emissions from power plants by 30 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels was never going to be popular with the powerful fossil fuel lobby.

The White House has worked hard to switch the focus to issues like public health and the impact of air pollution on asthma sufferers, topics many families embrace more easily than oceans rising a few centimetres a year.

Managing the politics was John Podesta, a longtime Democratic operative brought into the White House by Mr Obama last year to oversee the use of executive actions and bureaucratic ruses to get around Congress.

“The EPA rollout was one of the most successful the White House has done. I see John Podesta’s fingerprints all over it,” said Bill Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The EPA plan also displays Mr Obama’s priorities. He has ruthlessly pushed ahead with a legacy-building issue at the expense of the short-term interests of Democrats running in tight Senate races in energy states like Louisiana and Kentucky.

The critics who lined up to oppose the EPA proposal were entirely predictable. The uproar over the decision to release the Taliban, however, has spilled out in all manner of places.

Jim Cooper, a moderate Democratic congressman from Tennessee, and a rare representative for the party in the south, blamed the “Republican noise machine” for whipping up sentiment against the returning soldier.

“How do you organise hatred against a returning POW? I can’t remember one who has not been welcomed, but the Republicans have succeeded at it,” said Mr Cooper.

But it was not only Republicans who were angry about the prisoner exchange.

On top of questions about the deal – one US soldier for five Taliban – many Democrats in Congress were furious they had not been informed beforehand, in line with laws governing the release of prisoners from the US naval base in Cuba.

Mr Obama’s decision to hold a ceremony in the Rose Garden with the soldier’s parents looks foolhardy, as do the comments by Susan Rice, National Security Adviser, on Sunday talk shows the next day that Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl had served “with honour and distinction”.

After all, the questions over Mr Bergdahl, the prisoner, and whether he deserted his unit in Afghanistan before his capture were well known and well publicised long before his release.

“The whole going out in the Rose Garden and putting Susan Rice out there – what the heck was that about?” said a former senior administration official. “When we exchanged spies in the cold war, it wasn’t celebrated live on TV.”

Mr Obama’s decision to send the Taliban inmates to Qatar won praise from activists and lawyers who have been campaigning for more than a decade to close the Guantánamo facility. But the applause was begrudging, as they feel he has dragged his feet for years.

“The prisoner exchange is important because it shows the president can take bold steps when he is motivated,” said Wells Dixon of the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York. “In the past, it was politically convenient to point the finger at Congress.”

Once again, Mr Obama acted knowing that Guantánamo will figure in future assessments of his presidency. The prisoner swap might have got Congress’s back up, but trying to close the facility has had the same impact whenever he has tried.

The next big policy area Mr Obama is likely to tackle is immigration reform, now dying a slow death amid Republican divisions in Congress. Failing action in the House of Representatives by the close of the summer, Mr Obama is expected to introduce new rules slowing down deportations.

In many ways, Mr Obama has been set on the path to take power into his own hands since August, 2011, when a confrontation with Republicans over the budget brought the US to the brink of sovereign default.

“That whole experience in 2011 pretty much laid the next five years down,” said Mr Daley. “You could just feel this coming on both sides.”

Mr Obama gave up on Congress and Congress gave up on him, a mutually reinforcing downward spiral that also feeds into the worst of the president’s insular instincts. The president’s supporters in Congress still yearn for him to do more.

“(The Democrats) know Republicans can elevate trivial issues to Everest heights,” Mr Cooper said of his colleagues in Congress. “But they are disappointed Mr Obama is not a better politician.”

Few newcomers have been admitted into Mr Obama’s tight inner circle since he arrived in the White House nearly six years ago.

Close supporters doubt Mr Obama is capable of the kind of sinuous political outreach and charm that Bill Clinton revelled in.

“It is genetic,” said one longtime adviser to the White House. “I have given up hope it will ever change dramatically.”

Mr Obama, however, does remain touchy about criticism. On his recent Asia visit, he took a rare trip down the back of Air Force One to complain angrily and at length to the pooled press about articles depicting his foreign policy as flailing and weak.

In an off-the-record exchange that has since dribbled into the Washington press, Mr Obama summed up his foreign policy in just a few, pithy words: “Don’t do stupid s**t.”

By other measures, Mr Obama has developed a thicker skin in the process of trying, and then giving up, on working with his self-declared enemies in conservative politics.

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, describes Mr Obama as being in “second term closing out mode” and conjures up lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” – “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose” – to capture the president’s mood.

“You can’t bruise him any more,” said Mr Brinkley. “He’s become immune.”