The Obama loyalists argue that while he is being impolitic, he will leave a great legacy behind. True, they proffer, he may have gone for health care while the people wanted jobs, and tried to bail out Main Street by bailing out Wall Street rather than the other way around. However, look at the first major health care reform in decades, and the first major financial reform in years, and so on. (Actually there are not so many "and so ons".) The president himself once intimated that if he had to choose, "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." Most recently he allowed that he was governing while the Republicans were "politicking," but now he must also do some of this degrading stuff.
Well, the bad news is that if he does not do better politically, his legacy will not last long. If the economy continues to meander along, Japanese style, and the U.S. continues to be mired in a losing war in Afghanistan -- both look likely now -- the Republicans may well win control of both the White House and Congress in 2012.
And although they will not wipe out all that Obama achieved, they will cut and slice it, water it down, and then dilute it some more. The president and his remaining friends had better realize that legacy requires politicking. The argument that he can go for one at the cost of the other just does not hold water.
What would one wish Obama to have done in order to 'politic'? The term suggests compromise and horse-trading, but that's what he's done - or offered, and been refused. What critics are in effect asking for is that he should have been more firm, less accommodating. He should have used his majority in the Senate to ram through the bills, forced a public option in health, vastly increased the stimulus, etc. He should have yanked us out of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and let the Bushites know how perverted they were.
Its a shame that he is now being attacked for rejecting the artificial division of the policy world fostered by the old Left and the religious/Tea Party Right and for not riding roughly over any opposition. Presumably that rejection of the divide was what a lot of people wanted and voted for - not for picking sides. Republican lucky bets on obstruction and a throughly predictable slow recovery from the recession conspire with presumably reasonable critics like yourself to condemn the best chance we have had to get out of the cycle.
Posted by: Doug Chalmers | October 07, 2010 at 03:35 PM