Obama's presser and the politics of focus

It was Barack Obama's rimshot line of the evening, a sarcastic putdown laced with a rare but muted display of anger, a kind of "Go away, Sonny, you're annoying the adults" dismissal. But that curtness, directed at CNN's Ed Henry's unwithering probe into the president's purportedly delinquent outrage, said far more than just about anything else spoken last night:

"It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak."

Ouch. Bada-bing. A journalist's execution, live, right on the air; but perhaps it took just that to concentrate the national mind -- a stark, White House dispatch that the days of frivolous distraction are over, at least when it comes to what this president is willing to entertain.

Focus. That's pretty much all he was saying. He kept saying it, in a dozen other less lethal ways, for nearly an hour -- and one could see that he's still reading his American history, for it had a reassuring touch of the Rooseveltian in it:

"I think, when it comes to the banking system, you know, it was just a few days ago or weeks ago where people were certain that Secretary Geithner couldn't deliver a plan. Today, the headlines all look like, 'Well, all right, there's a plan.' And I'm sure there will be more criticism, and we'll have to make more adjustments, but we're moving in the right direction."

In short, you do what you can in the most immediate manner to fix the most vexing and immediate problems. Work through the crises, call audibles, make adjustments, do whatever is doable -- for now -- while keeping in mind and quietly working toward the larger goal of broad, sweeping reforms.

To attempt a comprehensive, best-of-all-worlds upheaval in every category, however -- say, in the banking industry -- while assorted crises of credit freezes and skyrocketing unemployment are boiling over, would be suicidally counterproductive; in part, because an outraged public made it so.

There was, simply and absolutely, no way the Obama administration could procure the necessary fresh appropriations from a mimetically outraged, bailout-exhausted Congress to seize the bloody lot of our criminally stupid bankers. The White house knew it, Treasury knew it, Congress knew it -- in fact, virtually everyone knew it and was willing to concede it, upfront, except Tim Geithner's harshest critics.

Righteousness is fine for Sunday mornings; but it won't move legislation, however intellectually holy and spiritually satisfying it be, through Congress.

Focus: deal with problems with the tools you have, which is merely what Obama and Geithner did. And for this potentially salvational act, they got vilified (as, by the way, did FDR, for similar acts of realistic immediacy) by both the left and right, especially the anti-pragmatic far left and far right, which, sadly, are rapidly morphing into indistinguishability.

Ameliorate the crisis first, and once the most threatening storms have passed and nerves are a bit less rattled, then you move in with an organic, re-regulatory regime and a whittling down of intolerable financial "bigness." But for heaven's sake, one must first weather the bugger.

Obama also sent an unambiguous signal that he's been conserving his political capital's firepower for more targetable game and longer-term recoil: his staggering $3.6 trillion budget that does tackle systemic reform in health care, education, energy and fiscal housekeeping.

He's been hoarding his ammunition, suffering bombardments of acute dissatisfaction over this, that and the other thing, while, to reference the aforementioned, keeping in mind the larger goal of sweeping reforms.

Doable ones -- but they wouldn't have remained doable had he squandered his bullets on other, massive reforms that were, alas, doomed with predestinate certainty.

Some don't care for the analogy of politics as a game, but it is a game -- of chess. And, as has been clear since the presidential primaries, as Obama's opponents ponder their next incisive move he has already calculated and maneuvered his way into the sixth or seventh. Through focus.

What's most peculiar is that as Obama progresses across the board, so many of his progressive critics don't even realize it -- which rather amusingly makes them seem less ungrateful than just plain, strategically obtuse. But that, too, is just part of the game, I guess.