7 months ago
Obama Capitulates!
As economic conditions deteriorate, President Obama proposed last week a new measure to create jobs. Like his 2009 stimulus bill, however, the jobs proposal is a mish-mash of tax relief (payroll tax forgiveness), gifts to the public sector unions (grants to local governments to forestall layoffs), extended unemployment insurance, etc. that will have no practical effect in encouraging businesses to hire more workers. To pay for it, he proposes raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires”, measures he could not pass when he had huge Democratic majorities, and has less than zero chance passing now that the Republicans control the House. And HE KNOWS THERE’S NO CHANCE OF CONGRESS PASSING HIS PROPOSALS!
Why does the President resort to cynical political maneuvering like this when the country’s bleeding? Because he’s given up hope. A President who campaigned as a conciliator has decided that he will not be re-elected unless he panders to the anger in his own political base. You almost get the feeling in watching the President’s body language that we, the people, have let him down, that we weren’t as good a country as he envisioned when he told us he could unify us and move us past dysfunction and pointless partisan division.
The people who really let Obama down were his economic advisors who saddled him with absurdly optimistic economic forecasts if we bought a poorly conceived economic agenda. Then, they scurried back to academia or Wall Street to resume their brilliant careers and left Obama twisting in the hot winds of political reaction.
The President seems lost, and grasping at straws, as the economy continues to suffer. People are beginning to wonder who the real Obama is: the fiery, partisan class warrior (who would never have been elected President in the first place) or the hopeful conciliator who appealed to our better instincts. We may never know…
1 year ago
Obama Braces for Electoral Repudiation
Though the votes in the 2010 midterm elections have yet to be cast, it appears that American voters are about to deliver a stinging rebuke to a young President by at least partially stripping him of his Congressional majority. How did he get to this unexpected place?
Part of it is bad luck. Unlike the smooth talker Bill Clinton, who presided over a largely problem free eight years, Obama inherited a terrible mess . More messes, like the Gulf Oil spill and a deteriorating Afghan war, happened on his watch. At least on paper, Obama has accomplished an astonishing amount: health reform, financial reform, financial recovery legislation, winding down the Iraq War, etc. Yet voters seem ready to take him to the woodshed. Why?
Because Obama has had remarkable difficulty communicating with and leading a troubled nation. The President is not an ideological liberal, but rather what is called in Illinois a “good government Democrat”, someone who believes that “good policy is good politics”. He is clearly mistaken. Good policy is good politics ONLY if a President can explain what he is doing in clear, simple and persuasive terms, and why it matters to a surly and suspicious electorate. He has to be a patient teacher of an electorate with a remarkably short attention span and shocking gaps in knowledge about their own country, and to do so without patronizing them. So far, he has been unable to command his classroom. The kids are gossiping, passing notes, walking in and out, texting their friends, but clearly not paying attention to the front of the classroom.
During the Gulf Oil spill, where the President seemed adrift, one of his advisors plaintively remarked that “this isn’t theater” when asked why the President didn’t appear to be doing more. Well, OF COURSE IT’S THEATER! Obama and his staff seem to have succumbed to the illusion that they are actually running the country. They aren’t. The country largely runs itself. “Running the country” is not what being President is about. Yes, the President has to make good policy choices. But he also has to APPEAR not only to be confident and optimistic, but to understand what people are thinking and feeling, and connect with them both symbolically and substantively. Roosevelt understood this. So did Kennedy and Reagan and Clinton. Leadership is at least partially theater, creating a climate that enables change through an emotional connection to the audience (e.g. all of us).
There is a lot of time for Obama to get it right. His term is less than half over. It will be interesting to see how rapidly this talented man grasps what’s missing in his Presidency, and figures out how to connect with Americans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31dowd.html?_r=1&ref=opinion Otherwise, he could well be half way to the end of his time in the Oval Office, and on his way back to Chicago.
1 year ago
Once More, With Feeling «
Sorry, Maureen Dowd, I don’t want the President to be my daddy! I don’t want some creepy, needy, manipulative megalomaniac like Bill Clinton to “feel my pain”. That’s not his job. I want Obama to THINK, HONESTLY, about what our society needs to move us forward and to use his limited stack of chips and the limited power of government to do so.
I voted for him precisely because he seemed so thoughtful and because he didn’t seem likely to pander to us or get caught up in our anger. When I see him channeling people like Al Franken or Frank Rich, it makes me cringe because that isn’t him. “Get mad and smite those nasty corporations” isn’t his job.
This is a fiendishly complex $14 trillion economy. The President doesn’t run that economy or our society. He can’t fix everything that’s wrong with us and it’s an invitation to totalitarianism to ask him to try.
That massive gusher at the bottom of the sea poses a hellish technical problem. It isn’t government’s job to know what to do, but to help manage the damage it causes to peoples’ lives.
2 years ago
I Don't Want to Be Rescued by the Government! «
Unlike fellow University of Chicagoan David Brooks, I’ve never been a conservative, Burkean or otherwise. I’m a centrist, independent Democrat who believes that, for the most part, people make better collective decisions than the “government” does, and that, per Jefferson, centralized power never devolves back to the people who pay for all of it. Where the government needs to play a role is solving problems that only government can solve, namely, separating strong from weak claims on resources and securing justice. That requires a certain restraint by those in power, doesn’t it?
I voted for Barack Obama because I believed his conciliatory “post partisan” campaign rhetoric. I was tired of all the shouting and blaming. It’s clear now that that’s what Obama’s campaign position was- rhetoric. He is certainly not governing as a centrist. Whether that’s because there’s no-one for him to meet in the middle, or because making common cause with the Soviet wing of his own party is better politics, that Obama is no more.
I supported health reform because I found it morally intolerable that nearly 50 million people were uncovered. What we got (and I’ve read every page of the bill twice) was an astonishingly untransparent, paternalistic extension of the government’s regulatory power into every part of the health system. I feel the same about financial reform, if only because an untransparent financial system will create another financial panic that will carry away the rest of my retirement savings. I just am not convinced that another deal packed two thousand page legislative project is going to fix it.
What this all feels like to me is a further, permanent extension of government power into my life, and the ascendancy of yet another technocratic elite who, because largely of where they went to school, think they know better than I do what ought to happen in society. I hate the thinly disguised bigotry of the Tea Party right. I hate the elitism and anti-market populism of Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman’s Democratic party.
So what does that make me: a f@#*ing political orphan.
And it pisses me off.
Barack, who art thou?
2 years ago
SOTU: Yes, Virginia, There is a President Obama!
I remember why I voted for this person. Needs a more focused Congressional partner. It was like watching LeBron James trying to inspire the Washington Generals (the perennial hapless opponents of the Harlem Globetrotters) to get ready to play ball in the big leagues. Lots of luck, LeBron?
What did you think of the President’s Speech?
