Obama's Scorched Earth Day

After a bipartisan blip on financial regulation in Washington, the President is in Manhattan, warning Wall Street, "A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it."

This tough talk comes after his lofty Earth Day anniversary proclamation: "Forty years from today, when our children and grandchildren look back on what we did at this moment, let them say that we, too, met the challenges of our time and passed on a cleaner, healthier planet."

The contrast underscores a new bipolar tone in the Obama presidency, pairing his inspirational gifts with the kind of hard-edged political pressure from the White House that marked the final days of the health care war.

As key GOP elders move away from Mitch McConnell's adamant obstruction of last week, a party official tells the Washington Post of the President's role in the reversal: "His rhetoric got really sharp and really mean...That's what changed."

In his weekly address, the President labeled McConnell "cynical and deceptive," challenging moderate Republicans to put up or shut up on financial industry reform.

Yesterday, Dick Shelby voted with Democrats to control derivatives, and now Chuck Grassley is predicting, "We're very close to a deal and there will be a substantial number of Republicans that go along with it."

After more than a year of nonstop naysaying, GOP ranks are finally collapsing under the pressure of public anger over banks and bailouts, stoked by an energized President in today's appeal to industry leaders to call off their army of lobbyists who are trying to derail regulation:

“Some on Wall Street forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged, there is a family looking to buy a house, pay for an education, open a business, or save for retirement. What happens here has real consequences across our country.”

The money manipulators may not respond to that message, but Congressional Republicans are showing signs of understanding that there could be "real consequences" for them in November if they don't.

As she often does, Gail Collins nailed it in her New York Times column today: "The Republican leadership originally seemed to believe that financial reform could be a replay of health care reform, with a political payoff for total obstruction. They’re discovering that the only real similarity is that both are almost impossible to explain. People love their doctors, but they tend to hate their bankers. Nobody is going to scare voters by predicting that if the Democratic bill passes, they may not be able to keep seeing the same hedge fund manager."

Obama Fatigue

After five months in office, his whirlwind presidency is taking a toll on the President in more ways than one.

Worrying about the economy "keeps me awake at night," he told an interviewer yesterday.

At the same time, signs of Obama Fatigue are showing up among his own party in Congress over the massive muddle of health care reform. His tireless cheer-leading has failed to paper over Democratic differences and delayed markup this week of competing bills to expand coverage and rein in out-of-control costs.

In what could be a Summer of Discontent, worries by and over a President who, depending on critics' politics, has too much on his plate or is overreaching keep surfacing daily.

"I am concerned," he admitted yesterday, "about our long-term debt because if we don't get a handle on that then there's no doubt that at some point whether it's the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, whoever else has been snatching up Treasuries are going to decide that this is too much of a risk."

Meanwhile, as he prepares to announce a new plan for regulating the financial system, there are reports of in-fighting among the regulators even after efforts to achieve a broad consensus outside the White House.

At the rate that Barack Obama is spending his mandate, even his most ardent admirers will soon need time to catch their breaths for the marathon of Change in the three and a half years ahead. The headwinds are getting stronger.

Reviewing Obama's Star Turn

The reviews will be mixed, but the President, to use his own phrase, "did OK"--and probably a little better than that--in his first star turn on the international stage.

In a heavy global melodrama not best-suited to his light touch, Barack Obama comes out of the G20 show with renewed respect for his leadership and about as much substantive accomplishment as possible from a large cast with conflicting motives.

“If there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy, that’s an easier negotiation,” Obama said at his international news conference afterward. “But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in.”

The President got only a fraction of what he wanted in stimulus--a pledge of $1.1 trillion to the International Monetary Fund and other institutions to help revive the global economy--but what he gave Europe in return was not at odds with his own goals.

"In the end," Steven Pearlstein notes in the Washington Post, "yesterday's communique, with its promise of a global regulatory crackdown, was an easy win for all concerned. Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel could declare victory over unfettered Anglo-American capitalism, while Obama now has added political ammunition for taking on the banks, hedge funds, rating agencies and private-equity firms that will try to water down his proposals."

Impressively, Obama spent an hour yesterday successfully brokering a deal between President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and President Hu Jintao of China on the language for cracking down on tax havens, which ended with the French president calling our own "very helpful."

Making friends and impressing world leaders won't do much to solve the economic crisis, but it's a start.