Obama's 5 biggest mistakes

The president's Republican opponents will surely spend 2012 hammering away at his failures. So what exactly are they?

As I wrote last week, President Obama can point to several successes as he runs for re-election. But like all presidents, he has made his share of mistakes as well. I promised to list what I think are his five biggest errors. Here they are: 

5. Jamming through health-care reform
In last week's article, this made the list of the president's biggest successes. But it also makes his list of mistakes. The president spent most of his political capital in his first year in office on health care, which he saw as a defining issue of his presidency. Aside from lingering questions over the constitutionality of the law's central provision — the Supreme Court will likely rule this summer whether the government can mandate that all Americans have health insurance — and questions about how much the program may cost, Obama did himself and the Democratic Party immense damage in terms of how the bill was passed. The president and congressional Democrats used divisive, bare-knuckled tactics, shoving the law down the throats of anyone in their way. "Hell no!" cried then-House Minority Leader John Boehner moments before the bill was passed. Anger over the Democrats' tactics helped fuel the rise of the Tea Party and the "wave election" of 2010, in which the GOP stormed back into the House majority. Obama has since complained of steady GOP obstructionism and a "do-nothing" Congress — but in a sense, he created this problem by passing major social legislation without first achieving any kind of bipartisan consensus. That's not how a president makes good policy.

The president used divisive, bare-knuckled tactics, shoving the health-care law down the throats of anyone in their way.

4. Failing to stop Iran
Over the weekend we learned that the Pentagon wants $82 million to make what is already its biggest bunker-buster bomb even bigger. The bomb is needed, officials say, to dig deep underground and hit Iranian nuclear facilities. This is a tacit reminder that the president has thus far failed to achieve his principle goal with respect to Iran: Bringing its nuclear weapons program to a halt. Obama has hurt the regime with tightened sanctions, but not enough to change its behavior. The president also passed on an opportunity to weaken the regime internally by supporting Iran's Green movement — the massive protests that erupted in June 2009 after an election was rigged to ensure another term for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At the time, Obama paid lip service to the Iranian protesters, but said "the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not interfering with Iran's affairs." The protest movement — the true beginning of the Arab Spring — was brutally crushed (remember the video of the young woman named Neda being gunned down?) and the regime marched on. Now the president appears closer than ever to "interfering with Iran's affairs" in a far more consequential way — with military force. 

3. Ballooning the deficit
In April 2010, the president launched a much-hyped deficit reduction commission, headed by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. Obama claimed to take Simpson-Bowles seriously. "Once the bipartisan fiscal commission finishes its work," he told an Ohio crowd, "I will spend the next year making the tough choices necessary to further reduce our deficit and lower our debt." The commission produced a plan to slash the deficit by $4 trillion over a decade. No sacred cows were spared: Three-quarters of the reduction would come from cutting government services and entitlement programs, and the rest from military cuts and the elimination of tax loopholes. But the president failed to endorse the plan. This opened the door to a series of 2011 fights: The debt ceiling clash between Obama and congressional Republicans, two missed opportunities for a "Grand Bargain" on deficits, the subsequent credit downgrade by S&P, and last fall's badly-misnamed "super committee." One of the president's economic allies, mega-billionaire Warren Buffett, said, "What happened with Simpson-Bowles was an absolute tragedy." The Republicans share the blame for the circus that was 2011, of course, but by tabling the recommendations of his very own blue-ribbon panel, Obama gave some voters — and GOP rivals — an early and perhaps lasting impression that he wasn't serious about making those tough choices.