Opinion Holding him to his word

On Capitol Hill,Obama set what his senior adviser,David Axelrod,calls “a very aggressive calendar,” only to discover that Congress does not necessarily respond to a presidential kick in the pants. He prodded lawmakers to pass energy legislation and a financial regulatory overhaul by the end of 2009. (The House has; the Senate hasn’t.) He demanded Congressional committees finish work on their health bills by August. (Four out of five did; that’s 80 per cent – a solid B.) He said he would sign a bill by year’s end. (Unlikely.) Now,he is pressing for the Senate to pass its measure by Christmas. (The clock is ticking.)

In foreign affairs,Obama vowed to sign a new arms control treaty with Russia by December 5. (The deadline expired,but after meeting President Dmitri Medvedev in Copenhagen on Friday,Obama said a deal was “quite close.”) He warned Iran to respond to diplomatic overtures on its nuclear program by year’s end. (Iran thumbed its nose; the administration is threatening sanctions.) On Afghanistan,Obama

imposed a kind of squishy deadline,saying he would withdraw troops beginning in July 2011,without providing an end date.

Historians say they cannot remember a modern president who has used deadlines and timetables as aggressively as Obama. Presidents tend to urge,cajole and exhort. But unless they are issuing threats to foreign adversaries,they try generally to avoid

boxing themselves into corners.

Some scholars wonder about the

wisdom of it,and whether Obama will pay a price. Charles O. Jones,a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin,put it this way: “Dick Neustadt,the greatest of presidential scholars,had a principal rule:

always be attentive,in making a decision,to the effects of that decision on your prospects for future power. The point being that if you are going to set a deadline then you’d better meet it. Otherwise,the judgment will be that you made a mistake.”

But as everyone knows,there are deadlines — and then there are deadlines. Ronald Reagan gave striking air traffic controllers a deadline to return to work; they called his bluff and he fired 11,000 of them in an episode that contributed to his aura of toughness. Obama,of course,cannot fire lawmakers for failing to meet his deadlines for passing bills. So on Capitol Hill at least,his deadlines carry less weight.

The risk is that if Congress continues to ignore Obama’s timetables,lawmakers will not believe he is serious when he sets new ones. Meanwhile,Republicans who negotiated with the administration on health care until their talks went sour over the summer,are complaining.

“I think these arbitrary deadlines were not appreciative of the fact that it’s a very complicated issue,” Grassley said,adding that by sticking to them,Obama had done “a lot of damage to the cause of bipartisanship.”

In foreign affairs,deadlines are that much trickier. Peter Feaver,who

advised Bush on national security,talks of the “multiple audience problem,” the deadline that sounds different to different ears. Some deadlines,he said,are useful in prodding the bureaucracy to get moving but can hurt a president if they are made public. (He puts Guantánamo in this category.) Others might please Americans but anger allies.

Bush was confronted with the question of deadlines in Iraq,and refused to set any for withdrawal,even though many Americans were clamouring for one. Feaver said the administration did have a “strategic horizon,” but found it difficult to explain to the public and

allies. “It was hard to figure out how to say it without it sounding like a deadline,” Feaver said,“which is what we didn’t want to convey.”

For Obama,perhaps no deadline has been as problematic as the first,the one to shut Guantánamo. The White House conceded months ago that the president would not be able to meet his own timetable. So by last week,when the administration announced it would relocate the detainees to a maximum security prison in Illinois,the question was obvious: When would Guantánamo close? The White House press secretary,Robert Gibbs,made clear that on one issue at least,the Obama administration was out of the deadline business: “I don’t have a date certain.”