Obey: Popularity, competency not the same

Almost 42 years ago, a state legislator from Wausau took the oath of office as the youngest member of Congress. Now 72 years old, Democrat David Ross Obey is retiring to private life.

Obey served under eight U.S. presidents. He agreed and disagreed with each one them.

One lesson Obey has learned over the years: Popularity and competency don’t always go together. Case in point today: He says President Obama is unpopular because he pushed Wall Street regulations, a health care overhaul and last year’s stimulus package.

“Where he has not been successful is explaining why he did it. The public never understood why it was necessary to run short-term deficits in order to get the economy moving again. The kind of politics I’ve learned is that if you’ve got a difficult problem you’ve got to explain it to people 100 times and the 100th time is the first time somebody will hear it.”

As for President George W. Bush — he says Bush’s victory over Al Gore in 2000 changed his mind about retiring then instead of now.

“I don’t take any pleasure saying it but I think he was the worst president I ever served under. He inherited $6 billion of projected surpluses and plunged us into huge debt by providing two tax cuts that were paid for with borrowed money, by getting us into two wars which were paid for with borrowed money.”

He liked Bill Clinton because he brought prosperity to the country by passing an austere budget.

“We got not a single Republican vote. It was very unpopular and we lost a number of seats because of it but history shows it was the right thing to do because it stabilized the situation and lead to a number of years of surpluses.”

He didn’t like the Wall Street deregulation by Clinton, Reagan and both Bushes. But he liked George Herbert Walker Bush.

“He was a civilized human being and he recognized that other people had different responsibilities and after Reagan blew the budget apart and exploded the deficit, the elder George Bush tried to begin the process of lowering those deficits.”

Obey compares Bush with Obama because he had lots of opposition from within his own Republican Party – like Obama has with some Democrats. Obey thought Ronald Reagan was a charming man who was fiscally irresponsible and has a lasting impact because he vilified big government.

“You may differ with government policy but people ask me how big and how strong do you want government to be? I want government big enough to defend the country. I want government that’s strong enough and capable enough to deal with economic crises or health crises that come along. I want a government that’s big enough and capable enough to keep the big boys in this economy honest.”

President Jimmy Carter was a bright, good man who Obey says had foreign policy success in the Middle East.

“But who had the style of a tinkering, fussbudget engineer. And that’s pretty much the way he came across.”

Although he opposed it at the time, Obey says President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974 was needed to unite the country.

“After Nixon, the country was scarred. People didn’t trust anything in government and Ford restored a sense of trust and a sense that the government was again being led by decent people.”

As for Obey’s first president as a congressman, he says Richard Nixon was the strangest and most paranoid man to occupy the White House. But he made strides to protect the environment and open up Communist China to the world.

“It’s a whole lot better than marching down the road to war. And if we had passed Nixon’s health care reform bill, which incidentally was more sweeping than the bill we just passed, if we had passed that we would have been well on our way to decency in the health care field.”

But when asked about his favorite of those eight presidents: It was Jerry Ford. He says he told that to Ford a year before he passed away in 2006.

“And he put his hand on my shoulder and said ‘Damn slim pickings, wasn’t it?’” Obey said.

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