President Barack Obama capped his most successful week in the White House so far with a surprise visit to Afghanistan. Obama gains steam, plows ahead

President Barack Obama has in one week gone from a man begging for votes from freshman congressmen to a globe-trotting commander-in-chief parachuting into a war zone.

Not long ago, Obama was pleading with Democrats that his presidency was on the line if health care reform failed. Now he expects new Wall Street regulations on his desk by September — or Memorial Day, if possible. The White House is also looking for Democrats to pass a revamped education law and renewed campaign finance restrictions while they’re at it.


The fact that today Obama is poised to plow ahead on an ambitious agenda is as much a testament to the pendulum of Washington politics — when you’re hot, you’re hot — as it is to Obama’s sustained quality of always playing the tortoise to everyone else’s hare. A little luck and timing never hurt either, and Obama benefitted from both to pull off several feats in a small window of time.

The president began last week with a midnight victory on his top domestic policy effort — which also happens to be the most expansive revamping of the nation’s health care system since 1965. He ended it with a secret, 14-hour flight to Afghanistan to personally confront his top foreign policy challenge in his first trip to the war zone as president.

In between, Obama won reforms to the federal student loan system that had been stalled for decades. He negotiated a new nuclear arms treaty with Russia. And he defied Republican objections, as Democrats have long wished he would, to unilaterally appoint 15 of his nominees.

For now, it looks as though Obama is turning a corner in his presidency, and the question is whether he’s able to capitalize on his gains — to have not just one good week but a series of them heading into what promises to be a difficult midterm election for the Democrats.

“This is the great Obama spring counteroffensive,” said Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University. “He has gained the initiative and he wants to press his advantage. I think that decision to maintain the offensive is a good one as long as he doesn’t get spread too thin.”

Obama’s challenge will be maintaining the momentum. After all, the White House had the same build-on-victory view after Obama signed the economic stimulus bill, and in the days after scoring a win on health care his aides were back to setting legislative deadlines — something Democratic leaders in Congress loathe.

And while Obama is looking good now, his approval rating is still hovering around 50 percent and recently matched its lowest level in the Gallup daily tracking poll.

That makes him either politically savvy or in for a tough wake-up call. Either way, he’s defied the system and hopes to do it again.

“He’s demonstrated to the political system that low polls and tough problems do not rule out success in spite of the fact that people on both sides of the aisle had been predicting failure on things like health care,” said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at the University of Texas in Austin. “So he’s feeling now that there’s nothing preventing his tackling other tough problems.”

Democrats believe the Obama of the past week is what Americans want. They particularly think his successes could convince skeptical independents that Democrats can govern and that Obama is the steadfast leader they hoped for. They’re also confident moving into the debate on regulating Wall Street because they believe it unites them and divides Republicans.

“It couldn’t be better for Obama right now,” said Democratic strategist Paul Begala.“The strength that he’s showing is critical to defining the Obama presidency. Nobody ever worried about whether he was smart. A lot of people worried about whether he was strong enough. Well, they’re addressing that. They’re showing strength.”

Even Republican Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President George W. Bush, sees an upside.

“I think the biggest gain he has is he’s put a little wind behind the backs of congressional Democrats who were scared to death that anything Obama touched would lead to failure and defeat,” Fleischer said. “He had a powerful and effective week in rallying his base, which is useful, but he still faces the fundamental problems that his first year decline led to, which is he’s polarizing, he failed to get any Republican support and he’s lost independents.”

Obama no doubt has big challenges ahead. The verdict is far from in on health reform, which the majority of Americans opposed at the time it was passed and Republicans have promised to make his political albatross. The president also faces a ballooning deficit, concerns about government spending and a nation with a 9.7 percent unemployment rate. On foreign policy, tensions are high in the Middle East peace process and the Iraqi elections have brought uncertainty to the U.S. drawdown of the war.

While Obama may enjoy momentum for his domestic success, getting positive political mileage out of foreign policy triumphs is notoriously difficult.

Peter Feaver, who worked on the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, said that at a time when Americans are more preoccupied with fears of terrorism than of nuclear attack by the Russians, an arms control pact that sounds like something out of the 1980s may have little political throw-weight.

But he thinks any successful visit by a president to a war zone has a derring-do element to it that plays in the White House’s favor.

“Anytime a president can pull off that kind of a surprise move, and Bush pulled it off several times, that gives the impression White House knows what it’s doing, knows how to execute a play,” Feaver said. “It also does draw attention to the one issue where [Obama] polls the best ... Afghanistan policy.”

Obama’s new mojo comes after being tethered to the White House for months getting in the weeds of the health care debate. Relieved of working the phones and huddling with lawmakers, it appears he’ll keep brisk pace on a number of fronts.

He will talk about health care in Maine this week. He’ll raise money for Democrats in Boston on Thursday, and the White House already has him teed up to do an event in North Carolina Friday, hours after the Labor Department releases the latest unemployment figures. Obama will also sign fixes to the health care bill and student loan reforms into law at a ceremony Tuesday before he and the first lady host French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife at the White House.

As he reboots for the second year of his presidency, Obama takes with him some valuable lessons from the first.

“They made some mistakes,” Begala said. “So I think that they come into the rest of 2010 with eyes wide open, and I don’t think they’re going to waste months and months again trying to get one or two or six Republicans to join them.”

That success breeds success is the well-known motto of Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

The president’s recent successes, while perhaps something to build on, don’t prevent him from being on the other end of the Washington pendulum next week — when you’re not hot, you’re not.

“Once you taste the blood of success so to speak, your appetite increases, and I think he’s going to see how far he can go with this,” Buchanan said. “He knows he’s going to have some setbacks but at the moment that’s not sufficient to keep him from pressing ahead.”

Josh Gerstein and Mike Allen contributed to this report.