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WASHINGTON — As President Obama struggles to turn around the moribund economy and confront multiple international issues, he wastes few opportunities to remind the country that the problems are not of his making.
“The financial crisis this administration inherited is still creating painful challenges for businesses and families alike,” Mr. Obama said this week as he proposed spending limits.
“We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we’ve seen in our time,” he said last week as he thrust General Motors into bankruptcy.
His advisers and allies follow the same script. “The Obama administration inherited a situation at Guantánamo that was intolerable,” James L. Jones, the national security adviser, said of the military prison in Cuba. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton defended the Obama foreign policy in the same vein. “We inherited a lot of problems,” she said.
Mr. Obama is hardly the first president to point to his predecessor. Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for the poor economy he inherited, just as Bill Clinton blamed the first President Bush and the younger Mr. Bush then blamed Mr. Clinton. Former Bush aides like Karl Rove argue that Mr. Obama has done it more extensively and routinely than other presidents have, although the Obama team denies that.
But at a certain point, a new president assumes ownership of the problems and finds himself answering for his own actions. For Mr. Obama, even some advisers say that moment may be coming soon.
Mr. Obama got a taste of that in recent days as he and his White House were put on the defensive trying to explain why the unemployment rate had risen to 9.4 percent when his staff had predicted it would peak at 8 percent as long as Congress passed his stimulus plan, which lawmakers dutifully did. Mr. Obama obviously did not create the recession passed to him, but it was his administration that set the expectation that his policy would keep it from deepening as far as it has.
Challenges stacking up overseas may increasingly be seen as Mr. Obama’s soon enough too, say advisers, critics and some outside experts. By sending an extra 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and replacing the commander there, Mr. Obama has now made that war his, as many analysts in Washington see it. The forceful position toward Israel that Mr. Obama has adopted in recent weeks over settlement expansion may also make the Palestinian conflict more and more his own problem.
“I think they’ve got till summer” until these issues become fully vested with Mr. Obama, said Ed Gillespie, a former White House counselor to Mr. Bush. “But the novelty’s already starting to wear off.”
Like many other former Bush aides, Mr. Gillespie bristles at the fingers pointed at his onetime boss. “Blaming Bush just is not going to resonate” soon, he said. “And it’s not what people are looking for in their president. They’re looking for somebody who’s not blaming somebody but is going to solve problems.”
David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said the White House was not trying to shift blame with its frequent invocation of the “inheritance” it had from Mr. Bush, but to seek public patience for policies that may require months and in some cases years to pay dividends.
“Whatever problems he inherited walking in the door, they’re his responsibility now,” Mr. Axelrod said. “Nobody’s trying to duck responsibility or make excuses for them. But it is important at times to put it into perspective, not to fix blame but to underscore that some of these problems are complex and they’re going to take time to solve.”
Analysts and historians say presidents can usually deflect fault in this way until their own policies have time to take effect.
“When a president tries new policies to deal with old problems and then new policies appear to be failed policies, then he owns it,” said George C. Edwards III, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “That’s the challenge for a president.”
David Winston, a Republican strategist, said that could happen even when people began to question whether those new policies were working. That is one reason the White House has pushed hard in recent days to make the case that its expansive spending program is beginning to show results even as it tries to reassure the public that it will rein in the spiraling budget deficit.
The spurt of public events came as the latest employment numbers showed that job losses were slowing even though the unemployment rate continued to rise.
Mr. Obama and his advisers assert that the $787 billion stimulus package enacted in February has already created or saved 150,000 jobs and will create or save 600,000 more this summer. But hundreds of thousands of jobs are still disappearing each month, and White House claims about “saved” jobs are hard to document.
The White House was forced to explain why its stimulus plan did not stop unemployment from rising above 8 percent, as it said in January that it would. White House economists said that forecast was consistent with independent predictions at the time and did not account for just how deep the recession really was in the last quarter of last year — in other words, under Mr. Bush.
“The recession just turned out to be deeper than was predicted,” Mr. Axelrod said.
Without the Obama plan, the White House argued, it would be even worse today. :rolleyes
At the same time, one by one Mr. Obama is effectively assuming ownership of the foreign policy issues he found when he took over from Mr. Bush. Some are easier than others to continue blaming his predecessor for. As North Korea defies Mr. Obama, he can point out that Pyongyang developed its nuclear weapons on Mr. Bush’s watch.
But on other issues, Mr. Obama is clearly applying his own imprint, and will get credit if it succeeds and criticism if it does not. The most obvious example of that is Afghanistan, where he has increased troop levels far beyond what Mr. Bush had in the field and ousted the previous military commander.
“At that point I really think Afghanistan became Obama’s war,” said John A. Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, a research organization founded by national security specialists who now work in the Obama administration. “When you choose your commander, you are accepting full responsibility.”
