There are times when President Obama seems to imagine himself as the moderator of a national discussion encompassing all the major issues. A similar fantasy must have been harbored by many gifted speakers, at one time or another. The odd thing about finding it in a president is that the fantasy is so completely non-political.
One of the strangest facts we know about Obama is that his colleagues and students at the University of Chicago Law School came away from discussions very impressed with his abilities, but not knowing what he thought about many issues. This was not torts or contracts. Obama's subject was Constitutional Law.
He has always had a reputation for being fair-minded -- a strength only attainable by someone who is (to begin with) minded. But the cautiousness of his first six months as president shows a pattern of accommodation that often lands him on the far side of actual prudence.
His instinct is to have all the establishments on his side: Wall Street, the military, the mainstream media; the most profitable corporations in all but the most signally failing industries; and that movable establishment (which disappears and reconstitutes itself), the quick-take pulse of popular opinion on any given issue. A president, ideally, wants all the establishments to support him, of course. You can't do without two or more at a time on your side; it is hopeless to set yourself at permanent enmity with even one. Yet to oppose the bankers on the question of bailouts, to oppose the military on drone assassinations, to exhibit non-pliability against the insurance companies and press for a public option in health care, to defy the slender majority of popular opinion that clamored for keeping Guantanamo open -- to have fought at least some of these battles need not have been hazardous for a president who came into office on a wave of revulsion against his opposite.
In dealing with some of these issues, Obama has stepped forward and then back. On some, he has not yet taken a first step away from his predecessor.
Pragmatic justifications have been offered to explain his aversion to any contest that implies a clash of opposing interests. Thus Rahm Emanuel said of the disastrously time-wasting courtship of Republican support for the stimulus package: "The public wants bipartisanship. We just have to try. We don't have to succeed." But try every time and you will waste your life. And when did the public say it wanted bipartisanship? The last fair measure was the election of 2008; and the public then gave a convincing majority to one party.
Alongside Obama's reticence sits a curiously incompatible trait, a certain grandiosity. This showed recently in his second statement about the Cambridge police. Offered a chance to concede that matters of local law were ultimately outside his province, he replied that in his view such things were "part of my portfolio." Psychologically, this may be so. But Obama is mistaken if he thinks many Americans want to see that portfolio carried into many other towns and cities. People like to think a president is too important for that. He stands at the very head of the dignified part of government (as Walter Bagehot called it). He can't at the same time enter into the efficient part of government at the level of the city police.
Doubtless a certain grandiosity is an aspect of the man. But if it is bad, all things being equal, to appear grandiose and worse to appear timid, it is the worst of all to be grandiose and then timid.
Occasionally Obama seems even better in ad lib discussions than one had expected -- with voters and reporters, and with other politicians. But he has turned out to be far less canny than he needs to be in making the sort of major speech that explains an issue from the ground up. The absence of such a speech on the economy in his first few weeks in office, and the public unease generated by that default, prompted the first of his "recovery" trips on the road, to the West Coast for several town-hall meetings and an appearance on The Tonight Show. Now, far into the discussion of health care, he has re-engaged the strategy with appearances at town hall meetings in the Midwest. These represent the second stage of closing an understanding with the public that lacked a first stage.
On July 30 the New York Times ran a story about a woman who owns a small business and has followed the president from place to place to ask him a question. Is there, she wanted to know, a single government program that has ever done anything right? (She got that knock-down challenge from talk radio.) Obama replied with two examples, Medicare and Veterans Hospitals. The business owner who had chased him down with supreme confidence in her mockery was surprised to hear those two sober examples. Nobody had told her. Then there is the citizen at another town-hall meeting who said: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."
Several months into the president's call for health care reform, their level of ignorance is his responsibility.
His characteristic way of handling confusion in the audience is to come back and give good answers to questions. That is very well, but no substitute for an early explanation. Mopping up in question-period is an academic skill: the points you failed to clinch in lecture you recover when the hands go up. But this presumes that everyone signed up for the lectures and everyone already knows something. Here, Obama's two opposing traits, the caution and the presumption, have joined with results that are deeply unhappy. He arrogates. He does not indicate. And when the argument is well underway, he starts his major explanation as an afterthought.
Obama cherishes the ideal of a frictionless transformation of society. It is a wish for aesthetic harmony, which he mistakes for a political goal. Its attainment would be a beautiful thing. But no matter how much he appeals for comity, Obama is certain to give offense to some. Better to choose your times and targets than allow others to force that choice.
His aversion to strife was plain from his conduct in the primaries and the general-election campaign. But the degree of avoidance we have seen could never have been predicted. Obama's training, one recalls, was in the community-reform methods of Saul Alinsky; and yet he seems to have adapted the relevant ideas in foreshortened form. The Alinsky process of reform, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out, goes from powerlessness to power in several stages. There is, first, the public recognition of powerlessness; then the airing of injustices, by legitimate polarization and active protest; then proposals of concrete reform; and only at last, power-sharing and reconciliation.
The strange thing about Obama is that he seems to suppose a community can pass directly from the sense of real injustice to a full reconciliation between the powerful and the powerless, without any of the unpleasant intervening collisions. This is a choice of emphasis that suits his temperament.
Reconciliation, however, can't be genuine or lasting without some polarization, a careful (not generalized) exposure of injustices, and a fight that feels like a fight. In the absence of these, reconciliation dwindles into a rhetorical device; it leads to short-term salvation formulae and a renewal of discontents. The same objection applies to Obama's wholly rhetorical notion that he can overcome the illegal actions of the Bush-Cheney administration by pardoning lower-echelon executors and "facing the future."
"His pragmatism is what is overwhelming him," said Obama's Chicago doctor about his approach to health care. A surprising and accurate insight. Pragmatism is supposed to trim; but taken to the circuitous lengths Obama allows, pragmatism is another word for the compulsive propitiation of unnecessary partners. It expands the work and blunts the achievement of reform. This president wants to move big, but he also wants to move slow; he wants to start a great change, but not to be the prime mover. So we get the large announcements: Guantanamo will close at once, Israel will freeze settlements, health care will be made reasonable. The president tries to line up all of his forces, all together -- and do it with so finely tuned an understanding he can't possibly be wrongly portrayed. But while he is working in the background in foreign policy, or leaving things to Congress in domestic affairs, those who are angry, Cheney, Limbaugh, Netanyahu, the big insurers, say what they please. They don't much care whether it is true. The errors "take," as errors will.
Like none of his predecessors, Obama seeks the part but disclaims the signature of a lawgiver. It may be that he mistakes politics for religion -- not less than everyone (he thinks) must share the credit for the great deed. Yet sometimes, also, he mistakes politics for physics. His larger policies have had as their premise: "Things can't go on as they have" -- as if it were a question of natural necessity. In Iraq, this was self-evident; visible reality handed him the change he stood for. Elsewhere the premise is not self-evident. And, good as Obama is in person, a resonant speaker, an impressive master of details once the details are in, he has not yet explained a single major policy in advance with the accessible clarity Paul Krugman brought to health care simply by listing its four elements: regulation, mandate, subsidy, public option. Such explanations should not have to wait for the intervention of a sympathetic columnist.
Somewhere at the bottom of the missteps of the last few months is a failure to recognize the depth of the popular ignorance a president of the United States confronts on any issue. This complacency and the tactical errors that have flowed from it might be atoned for by other qualities in a parliamentary leader, whose majority and positions come with the job. But the Democrats have yet to prove that their majority means something solid; and their positions depend on no-one so much as the president. The party, for years, wanted a leader to assure their unity; they thought Obama was the one. Yet he has made it felt in many ways since becoming president that he would be disappointed to identify himself as leader of his party.
His political fortune will now depend on his readiness to reverse that posture. To take control of his presidency, he must give up the ambition to serve as the national moderator, the pronouncer on everything, the man with the largest portfolio. If the public option in health care reform is finally defeated, Obama will not soon recover his credit as a national, a party, or a general-issue leader. To avoid that fate, he will have to grant to politics, mere politics, an importance he has not allowed it thus far.
This cult of personality has to end, and right now and right here is as good a place as any. So what if Obama isn't a person you actually like? It isn't his job to be your best friend. It isn't his job to take on your personal agenda. And it is outside the bounds of reason to imply that after such a short time in office this one man should have been able to fix problems that have been decades in the making.
For my part, although I'm not in love with Obama, I didn't expect to be. He is my president, not the boy who took me to the prom and then flirted with another girl. Call me slow, but I'm still basking in gratitude because the American people were smart enough to not elect Grandpa Munster and Caribou Barbie. You want something to complain about? Those two would have given you much more than Obama ever could.
Let's be honest a lot of dishonest things are written and said about the President practically every day.
Don't just blindly believe whatever you read and see do some fact checking.
The writer also suggest that is President Obama's fault that a woman didn't know the VA or Medicare are government run programs. Now if he had said to Americans that the VA and medicare were government run programs, then the someone would have cried Obama thinks we're stupid.
The media should do more fact checking also instead of simply repeating accusations directed
at the President. Also I am surprised the media did not comment more on the Jewish organizations,
including the ADL denouncement of Rush Limbaugh equating President Obama to Adolph. At the minimum anyone calling the U.S. commander in chiet Hitler should be banned from broadcasting to our armed forces. It's an affront to the U.S soldiers and millions of others that were killed by Nazis.
Nice appeal to authority. You claim Rasmussen is "most accurate polling organization" then use their "most accurate" polling results.
And 70% of people polled don't agree with the Town Hall protesters. They believe that the current health care system needs to be reformed. 70% is not a small margin, it is a large majority.
Do you draw any conclusions from your numbers or are they just thrown out there in some intellectual vacuum?
Also, Bill Clinton won the 1992 Presidency with 43% of the vote. Obama won the 2008 Presidency with 53% of the vote.
There are many differences that are not "simple."
My goodness, if Health Care does not pass – Obama should just resign. The abovementioned goings-on are “going on” and they need support. They don’t need Democrats and Independents falling on the floor and crying – not wanting to get up – saying “this is the issue that is going to define him.” There is a lot going on that you need to back him up with. E pluribus unum - "from many one"
The good news, tho, is that we are now using the patient's own stem cells to treat diseases and extend people's lives.
My brother-in-law has Non-Hodgkins leukemia - and a had a bone marrow transplant with his own stem cells. He is doing well; of course we never know how long that will last.
My point is, the practice of using fetal stem cells is very wrong - and removing barriers to it is not a good thing. It seems nothing is sacred with Liberals.
If he cannot deliver a convincing Medical Insurance reform, then his Presidency will be on the line. He promised change. We all know he's got nil experience, and so far the cast of players in his economic team are all retreads and represent Wall St at it's worst.
I'm waiting for change.
Get some!
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html
Right now, people are in panic mode because we have no idea what is in that bill.
The few things we have seen have been very bad, and most of us don't feel that we can't trust a word OB says. He can do all the speeches he wants but he has crossed the line too many times.
I don't think it can be turned around at this point.
There lies the problem in war or sport the main objective is to render half the men on the field failures.
Emanuel gives marching orders Gibbs declares victory and tries to gain a yard of territory.
But rendering your opposition here in America failures weaken the whole country dividing an conquering leaves the losers feeling like rats under a tub confused and anxious.
Perhaps the approach should be different perhaps President Obama should approach the job as a great conductor using each voice to create a great symphony Where the separate different and even dissonant voices are melded into great music the sum of the parts more powerful than one alone.
---------------
It must be only among political pundits that a President's knowledge, concern and willingness to be involved in what citizens go through in their daily lives is called "grandiosity".
Offered a chance? By whom?
The President was exactly right in his remarks at the press conference, including regarding Cambridge police acting stupidly. They did act stupidly. That is why all charges against Professor Gates were dropped. It seems that that simple logic escapes most pundits.
----------------
You start out stating not what Obama is, but what he seems to you. Starting in the next sentence, and throughout your article, you take that premise of yours to be true. In other words, your whole article is an unsound argument. Just to illustrate that Obama is more than a "moderator of a national discussion", the following is a partial list of his accomplishments:
Stem cell order reversed.
SCHIP passed and signed into law
Ledbetter bill passed and signed into law.
Major Green energy initiatives started.
EPA rules revised to address Climate Change.
Executive order signed to protect large areas from drilling.
Car emission standards revised.
National Science Foundation funding boosted.
Stimuls bill passed, and already helping revive the economy.
Finacial system reform plan implemented.
Regulations on the way.
Gitmo closing ordered.
T0rture banned.
Iraq troop withdrawal ordered.
Afgahnistan approach revised.
Direct negotiations with Iran on the way.
Negotiations with Syria in progress.
Disarmament talks with Russia re-started.
Travel restrictions lifted and normalization of relations with Cuba on the table.
Energy/Climate Change legislation passed the House, soon to be passed by Senate.
Healthcare legislation on the way.
All that in six months.
And I’m sure that missed many items.
Something the country should know and many of should be able to repeat.
The environment and climate change items are better than Bush, but that's about all that can be said. He is still pandering to the corn and coal state lobbies, and much like Rumsfeld in Iraq, the level of commitment is insufficient to the scale of the problem (except in cost).
The financial reforms are toothless. They do not address the basic structural problems of "too big to fail", and client-payer credit ratings. The bailout has actually increased the moral hazard risk.