Obama, With a Pile of Chips

By JOHN HARWOOD
NYT

WASHINGTON — It is not too early to ask whether President Obama’s robust supply of political capital has begun to dissipate. Predecessors with bigger victory margins have lost it this quickly.

Few remember the early travails of Franklin Roosevelt after he swept 57 percent of the vote and all but six states against Herbert Hoover in 1932. But political insiders scorned his extended post-election passivity — presidents weren’t inaugurated until March then — including a Caribbean yacht cruise while the Great Depression festered.

“By early February, the president-elect was in political trouble,” Jonathan Alter wrote in “The Defining Moment,” his history of F.D.R.’s first 100 days. And then Roosevelt executed a leadership tour de force that lifted the nation’s spirits, swept his New Deal agenda through Congress and durably transformed the federal role in American society.

In other words, it may not be too early to ask whether Tom Daschle’s tax problems, Judd Gregg’s ideological misgivings, Wall Street’s catcalls and the near-complete Republican rejection of Mr. Obama’s economic stimulus package add up to the depletion of his momentum. But it is too early to answer with much confidence.

Presidential mojo is an elusive and ephemeral force that flows from many sources. It derives largely from numbers: the size of the election victory, the poll ratings, the breadth of partisan support in Congress. By those measures, Mr. Obama’s 53 percent popular vote majority, mid-60 percent job approval ratings, and solid House and Senate majorities compare favorably at this stage with the profile of any new president post-World War II.

But the sustainability of those power gauges can be inversely related to the scale of the political challenges a president faces — sometimes exhausting his capital in the first year of a White House term. The recession and two wars facing Mr. Obama easily match the stagflation and cold war challenges that confronted Ronald Reagan in 1981, and may exceed those of any predecessor since F.D.R.

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