Archive for the ‘Obama’ Category

Taxing Issues

May 20th, 13 / 0 Comments

Trouble comes in threes and in the case of the stumbling start to Barack Obama’s second term trouble is spelled three ways – B-E-N-G-H-A-Z-I, I-R-S and A-P.

First, to state the obvious, this White House is pretty awful at political crisis management. Axelrod and Pfouffle are gone and the second term White House team seems both slow and indecisive, while opponents paint them as the venal second coming of Richard Nixon. The president’s strangely detached management style and his cool aloofness makes the country long for a Harry Truman who would cuss, get mad, write nasty letters and then calm down and do something presidential like fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur. When Obama gets mad he seems merely petulant or perturbed that one of those pesky White House reporters is asking another silly question.

Usually in politics the worst wounds are self-inflicted and the Obama team’s handling of the Benghazi tragedy is largely an exercise in failing to aggressively detail what happened and why. The White House seemed to think its good intentions would be enough to defang the deranged chorus that is determined to make the response to the Libyan tragedy more important than the tragedy itself. The slow reaction, shifting story line and “trust us we know what we are doing” attitude made an important story about the tender box that is the Middle East (and the limits of American power in that troubled region) into a scandal. It didn’t have to be, but this White House tends to dismiss its critics rather than aggressively explain itself. Never a good strategy in politics.

The second Obama second term “scandal” involves the secret collection of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, an action that is, of course, just pure political stupidity. Every administration settles into office thinking it can control everything about everything. Eventually every president should discover, but most don’t, that maintaining firm control of a vast bureaucracy with access to telephones and the phone numbers of reporters is a fool’s errand. Leaks happen for many reasons and some are honorable, many not. Vanity and a sense of power is often involved. Once in a while a leaker picks up the phone in order to expose real wrong doing. More often – brace yourself – a leak is designed to to inflict pain, secretly settle a grudge or influence a policy debate inside the government. The State Department leaks on the CIA, the White House leaks on someone it wants out of the way, the Army leaks on the Navy and, by most accounts, the CIA leaks on everyone. In the Bush Administration Dick Cheney’s guy Scooter Libby went to jail for his role in outing a CIA operative, a story about leaks to reporters, but given all the current hoopla that detail is just ancient history.

In the AP phone records case the story at issue involved details about a thwarted terrorist bombing, but when the CIA director says, as John Brennan did, that the AP story amounted to ”unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information,” every American should look for a grain of salt. We need to remember that in the post-9-11 world a society that tries to maintain something like openness is going to have to put up with the occasional newsworthy leak of information that the secret forces within the government would like to stay secret. A wise old editor once told me the way it must work. “The government tries to keep its secrets and the press tries to find them out.” Those are the rules of engagement that still must apply in a free society.

The Johnson corollary to that free press/free society notion is that no American government can’t manage the press by subpoena and you’ll never stop the leaks, never. In any event, as a general rule too much government information is classified and reporters, of all people, know that all too well. So the AP phone records snooping is recorded as self-inflicted wound number two of the still-infant Obama second term. Just a thought, but it might be a good time for the attorney general to return to private life.

Which brings us to the IRS scandal, the scandal the GOP correctly sees as the most damaging to the administration for the simple reason that everyone has a gripe with the IRS. Never mind that presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon displayed little hesitation about turning the tax man loose on political opponents, the idea that any modern administration – particularly in the wake of the real scandal that was Watergate – would employ the IRS to go after enemies is repugnant and needs to be investigated. Congressional Republicans with the help of many Democrats will see to that. The administration would be well-advised to get the details out – quickly. So far it hasn’t. 

Still, the truly interesting detail about the IRS mess is not that the White House ordered up any special scrutiny of Tea Party groups, since there is no evidence that took place, but rather that the IRS review of the flood of applications for tax-exempt status for politically oriented groups – most of which were conservative – has its roots in swamps of political money and particularly in keeping the sources of vast amounts of political money secret.

A “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame said, at least in the movie version of All the President’s Men, “follow the money.” More on that next time.

 

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Obama, Politics

A New Year

Jan 2nd, 13 / 0 Comments

Faced with a difficult re-election campaign in 1940 – he was after all seeking an unprecedented third term – Franklin D. Roosevelt did the politically unthinkable. He named two extremely prominent Republicans to his Cabinet.

One appointee, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, (that’s him with Gen. George Marshall) had actually served as Secretary of State in the Cabinet of Republican Herbert Hoover as well as serving previously as Secretary of War under Republican William Howard Taft. Stimson was an absolute pillar of the GOP establishment.

The other GOP appointee, Navy Secretary Frank Knox, had been the Republican vice presidential candidate on the ticket that ran against FDR just four years earlier. Roosevelt thumped the GOP ticket in 1936, but the move to bring Knox into the administration was a significant gesture with lasting political and policy implications. Think about Barack Obama finding a Cabinet spot for Sarah Palin. OK, bad example.

Nevertheless, talk about bipartisanship.

Roosevelt, a master political manipulator, sprung his bipartisan surprise on the country just days before the 1940 Democratic convention. Many of the party faithful were stunned and when they thought about it outraged. How could a sharply partisan Democrat on the eve of a national election turn two of the most important Cabinet jobs over to two such partisan Republicans, many Roosevelt allies wanted to know?

The answer was pretty simple. Roosevelt needed bipartisan cover to begin to get the United States on more of a war footing. He needed Republican support to institute the first peace time draft in the nation’s history and  to find a way to aid Great Britain in its desperate fight against Nazi Germany. Stimson and Knox were well-known “interventionists” who FDR could count on to battle for the president’s foreign policy priorities even in the face of their partisan backgrounds.

President Obama would be wise to do something similar at the dawn of his second term as he looks to replaces Leon Panetta at the Defense Department and Timothy Geithner at Treasury, among others.

By all accounts Obama has been thinking about former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel for the Pentagon job, but Hagel is already proving to be a lightening rod, primarily for comments he made years ago about an openly gay ambassador nominee in the Clinton Administration. Still, a bipartisan group of former National Security Advisers have endorsed a Hagel nomination. Hagel’s gaffe found insulting by the LGBT community, in my view, should not disqualify him. He’s a budget hawk at a time when the Pentagon budget needs to shrink and history will treat him well for opposing the invasion of Iraq. Hagel is just the kind of Republican Obama needs.

Treasury speculation centers on current White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew, who enjoys the president’s confidence – a not unimportant fact – but really gets Obama nothing politically.

Two of the biggest challenges the president faces in a second term involve putting the nation’s fiscal house in better shape and facing down a Congress, including Republicans and Democrats, who will not want to really take on military spending as a key element in addressing the first issue.

Obama could really use hard-headed, pragmatic Republicans in the key Defense and Treasury spots to serve as the point of the spear in the coming budget battles. It’s time for the buttoned down White House to think outside the typical Beltway Box.

How about retiring GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine at Treasury? She’s a veteran of the Finance Committee and a senior member of the Taxation subcommittee. She’s smart, moderate and candid and its past time a woman ran Treasury.

Or, really unset the apple cart and nominate former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson as Treasury Secretary. The press would love it, Republicans would have to go along, Democrats would be skeptical and the American public – not to mention Wall Street – would see in such a pick that Obama is serious about a fiscal house cleaning. Simpson is 81 and may only want to serve for more than a year or 18 months, but that about the time available in a second term for Obama to get something big done. The outspoken Simpson would help him.

John Kennedy needed the same kind of Treasury help in 1961 and turned to a Republican Wall Street insider C. Douglas Dillon. Harry Truman was smart enough to bring Herbert Hoover back to the White House to advise him on post-World War II relief and eventually government re-organization. That unlikely collaboration resulted in a deep and genuine friendship. The great Lincoln went outside his party to put Andrew Johnson on his second term ticket in the interest of national – or at least northern – unity.

As Obama thinks about a 2013 cabinet, he would be well advised to think of political people – Republicans and Democrats – who are “of politics” but not “in politics.” People like former Oregon Sen. Gordon Smith fit that bill or former Utah Governors Mike Leavitt and Jon Huntsman. Leavitt was a Mitt Romney partisan and is a health care expert who would have immediate credibility on issues like Medicare spending and reform. Huntsman has already served as Obama’s ambassador to China and it’s clear that his moderate views would have made him a better GOP candidate last year than Romney. Having him inside the Obama tent again in some significant role would be a master stroke.

Or, how about a truly gutsy and game changing pick – former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush? Give the smartest of the Bush clan the Pentagon job with a mandate to right-size the American military for the threats of the 21st Century. I can hear the chuckling. Why would Bush, a future GOP presidential candidate, do that? He probably wouldn’t, which makes the offer even more intriguing. Let him say no to the president. No harm and much benefit in asking.

In a second term, Obama will find that his window to accomplish anything important will close very, very quickly. He can buy himself more time, more public good will and both intrigue and frustrate his opponents in both parties by wrapping a genuine cloak of bipartisanship around his shoulders.

By inviting some very high profile Republicans to the Cabinet table Obama is sure to set off Democratic grumbling. Who cares. Republicans will fume because they will know deep down that Obama has outfoxed them again. Let them vote against a couple of GOP nominees. The public, hungering for bipartisan acts, would love it and the benefits will last for the rest of the president’s term.

A couple of high profile, gutsy, unexpected Cabinet appointees would be a great way for Barack Obama to start the New Year.

 

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Obama

Guns and Guts

Dec 20th, 12 / 0 Comments

 

In 1963 when the young black activist, John Lewis, who later became the distinguished Congressman from Georgia, was nearly beaten to death during a civil rights march in Alabama, the cautious John F. Kennedy knew he could not fail to push forcefully for meaningful legislation that would attempt to bring blacks into the mainstream of American life.

Bending the curve of the epidemic of gun violence in a gun deranged society presents Barack Obama with the same kind of challenge. It has been suggested that the Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre will be Obama’s defining moment as president; more significant than being the first African-American president, more important than hunting down bin Laden or dealing with the worst economy since the Great Depression the aftermath of the awful school shooting will define Obama’s legacy.

Read what Kennedy said about civil rights almost 50 years ago and apply the same words to Obama’s defining moment today.

“We face…a moral crisis as a country and a people,” Kennedy said in a television speech on June 11, 1963. “It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives. It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality.”

Right as well as reality. Kennedy immediately introduced civil rights legislation that he did not live to see enacted, but the important political fact is that he seized the moment to declare that the Nation faced a “moral” crisis. No less a crisis confronts Obama’s Nation on the cusp of 2013.

So much of the initial reaction to Sandy Hook seems so small, so completely fanciful or so focused on treating the symptoms of gun violence. The sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin suggests, amazingly, that armed guards should be posted in every school and every public place. Others tout arming teachers or bullet-proofing the backpacks of six-year-olds. Obama, already on record supporting reinstating the assault weapons ban, must know from reading the morning paper that such weapons are flying off the shelves as Americans beef up their arsenals in expectation that Congress might take a step that few really believe will have much impact. Thousands upon thousands of such weapons are already in circulation and even Sen. Diane Feinstein, the California politician with first-hand experience with gun violence, concedes that a new assault weapons ban won’t impact those weapons already abroad in the land. And the president’s one specific proposal so far, an interagency task force headed by Vice President Biden, seems so inside the beltway, so bureaucratic as to invite a Saturday Night Live parody.

A moral crisis, JFK knew, required more than a task force or a what will amount to a slightly better than symbolic ban on military-style weapons sitting in the corners of American closets. Obama must know this and that makes his Sandy Hook response his own moral crisis.

The assumption underlying all the small thinking about how to prevent the next school massacre is that our Nation cannot – ever – confront the real issue – too many guns and too few controls over who owns them and how they are bought. Australia, not exactly a nation know for its wild-eyed liberalism, decided to do something about assault weapons and launched a national “buy back” effort that has dramatically reduced the number of such weapons. Canada imposes a 28 day waiting period to purchase a weapon and then requires that two people vouch for the purchaser. We have certain requirements in place that require mental health reporting, but many states ignore the requirements. A serious moral response to Sandy Hook and Tucson and Columbine and on and on demands a serious and deeper look at what must be done to break the curve of violence.

As Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker, “Gun control works on gun violence as surely as antibiotics do on bacterial infections. In Scotland, after Dunblane, in Australia, after Tasmania, in Canada, after the Montreal massacre—in each case the necessary laws were passed to make gun-owning hard, and in each case… well, you will note the absence of massacre-condolence speeches made by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia, in comparison with our own President.”

In places like Idaho and Wisconsin all the disquieting talk about tougher controls on guns will be greeted with completely predictable outrage. The NRA will soon move from crisis management mode to Capitol Hill assault mode and the gun lobby’s champions in public office will fume against attacks on Second Amendment rights and, many American will hope, that the same old politics will replace images of funerals featuring tiny caskets. If such comes to pass Obama’s moral moment will recede and the belief that nothing can be done will continue to rule our streets and schools.

Serious – really serious – steps to control guns will be intolerable to many Americans. John Kennedy’s civil rights speech in 1963 carried just as unpalatable a message for many Americans in Alabama and Mississippi and many other places. Kennedy told his brother, the attorney general, that television images of police dogs attacking civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham made him “sick” and convinced him that the South would never reform short of strong federal civil rights action.

As TIME noted in a 2007 essay on JFK’s slow conversion to the cause of civil rights, “Although Kennedy’s assassination five months [after his civil right speech] deprived him of the chance to sign the civil rights bill into law, he had finally done the right thing. That its passage in 1964 came under Johnson’s Administration should not exclude Kennedy from the credit for a landmark measure that decisively improved American society forever. Although J.F.K. had been slow to rise to the challenge, he did ultimately meet it. That gives him a place in the pantheon of American Presidents who, in his own words, were profiles in courage.”

Civil rights became a bipartisan national cause, not for everyone, of course, with dead-end southerners like Richard Russell fighting to the bitter end, but a national cause nonetheless. Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, for example, understood both the politics and the morality of the moment and stood on the right side of history with Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King. The current moment begs for such leadership from both sides of the political divide.

No single law, no task force, not even essential improvements in mental health will stop American gun violence, but Barack Obama must know, as Sandy Hook Elementary enters American history in the same way Selma and Montgomery and Birmingham did a half-century ago, that half-measures aren’t adequate to confront a moral crisis. Unfortunately racial divide still exist in America since no single law could end that moral crisis either, but after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the United States was a different and better place. Such a moment is upon us again.



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Guns, Obama

The Right Call?

Oct 30th, 12 / 0 Comments

Months ago when they became convinced that Mitt Romney would be the eventual Republican presidential candidate, Barack Obama’s campaign brain trust made a critical strategic decision. They decide to attempt to define Romney as an ultra-rich, ultra-out-of-touch corporate raider, the kind of guy who just isn’t like most Americans.

The Obama campaign and its Super PAC allies spent all summer, as the favorite catch phrase of politics now holds, advancing that “narrative.” We learned about Romney’s dealings at Bain Capital, his California house with elevators for his cars – a couple of Cadillacs – and his off-shore bank accounts. For weeks it seemed like Romney was playing right into the “narrative.” The pundits talked endlessly of the need to “humanize” the corporate CEO and Romney steadfastly refused to release any more than two years of his very well-to-do income tax returns.

The other “narrative” the Obama campaign could have chosen and didn’t was Romney the shameless “flip-flopper” – the guy who was for abortion rights before his was against them, the governor who did Mittcare before there was Obamacare, the guy who said setting a deadline to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was a mistake before it wasn’t. We’ll know in a week whether the Obama strategic decision months ago was a wise one. Here’s a bet that it wasn’t.

The Denver debate where “moderate Mitt” emerged and grabbed the campaign momentum may well go down in presidential campaign history as the greatest single debate game changer ever. Romney skillfully, if some think shamelessly, remade himself before the very eyes of millions of American voters. He was no long the candidate who labeled 47% of Americans as unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives, but he became the smooth and comfortable former CEO with a five-point plan to remake the economy. Obama’s stumbling and inexplicable debate performance in Denver helped Romney re-set his campaign, but even cynic political professionals have to hand it to the former governor – he seems to have pulled it off his slide to the middle. He etch-a-sketched his campaign without even appearing to shake the red plastic frame.

The major reason, I think, Romney so completely re-set his image was that long ago strategic decision of the Obama campaign to paint him as Richie Rich, the evil corporate chieftain rather than as a John Kerry-style flip flopper. You may remember the crippling commercial the George W. Bush campaign ran against Kerry in 2004. With Kerry wearing loud, baggy swim trunks and changing direction while wind surfing, the closing line of that commercial was a masterpiece: “John Kerry – whichever way the wind blows.”

The Bush campaign in 2004 was smart enough and strategic enough to do what I’ll call the “Full Rove” on Kerry. They took the brightest page of Kerry’s resume – his Vietnam War service – and turned it into a liability. Kerry went from being a Silver Star winner with genuine foreign policy credentials to a long-haired anti-war protester who may not have been a hero after all.

The second half of the Full Rove was to label Kerry a serial waffler. This year, by contrast, the Obama campaign completed only half of the Romney “narrative,’ which has given the GOP candidate lots of room to shift and shape his positions to suit the slice of the electorate he is attempting to appeal to.

Say what you will about Romney’s potential as a president – and we may well get to find out how well that works out – there has seldom if ever been a major national politician who has so skillfully shifted his positions. By choosing not to go after the difference between Romney’s four years as governor of Massachusetts as his six years as a GOP candidate for president, the Obama team made it possible for Romney to bob and weave on the issues as skillfully as anyone ever has in such a high profile campaign.

Before this election – just ask John Kerry – the accusation that a candidate was an unprincipled flip flopper was often political kryptonite. Romney rarely has had to defend himself, because of the Obama strategic decision, against what was once consider indefensible in politics – shifting a position out of pure political expediency.

The other thing, I think, that the Obama troops got wrong was believing that the rich guy narrative was enough in and of itself to sink Romney. Obama, playing defense much of the fall, has not succeeded, and hasn’t really tried, to connect Romney’s corporate raider resume to the economic mess the country has endured for more than four years. In other words, the “narrative” lacks a clear and compelling bridge to what many Americans feel about this election – it’s all about the economy. As a result the economic debate has largely been all about Obama’s record and not about Romney’s barely defined approach to solving the problems in the economy and, not surprisingly, the polls show Romney winning on that issue.

Americans, it should be noted, also don’t automatically dislike a rich guy. Even the increasingly goofy Donald Trump gets a pass on that score. Most folks don’t dislike The Donald because he seems to be rich. They dislike him because he’s a publicity seeking blowhard.

Romney the rich guy with the five-point plan may well sneak in the Oval Office. Mitt the Shifter basically got a free pass. Obama’s strategic decision not to combine the out-of-touch rich guy attack with the serial flip flopper attack never gave the president the chance to say –  ”Oh, come on now governor…there you go again.”

Endlessly changing positions is ultimate about more than merely flipping and flopping, its about character and in politics character matters more than the size of your bank account.

 

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2012 Election, Obama, Romney

The Big Mo

Oct 23rd, 12 / 0 Comments

Mixing sports and political analogies can be dangerous, but there is so little left to be said about the presidential campaigns – here goes.

The San Francisco Giants (happily for we Giants fans) clearly have what George H.W. Bush once called “The Big Mo.” The dejected St. Louis Cardinals had their National League rivals on the ropes (sorry, a boxing reference) in the league playoffs until a sneaky left hander, apparently in the twilight of his pitching career, reversed the Francisians’ slide and created the kind of momentum that is hard to explain in sports (and politics), but undeniably can be just as important and as a timely as a three-run homer.

A debate in Denver in early October changed the arc of momentum in the presidential campaign and Barack Obama is learning how terribly difficult it can be to get an opponent’s Big Mo turned off and turned around. By all reasonable accounts the presidential election campaign is just where most of us thought it would end up when we first measured an Obama-Romney match-up months and months ago. The race is down to six or seven states – lucky them – and will likely turn on the ground game of the two campaigns in a handful of counties in Ohio, Iowa and Virginia. Without doubt, however, The Big Mo has and will help the challenger.

One of the toughest things in politics – and sports – is to finish a long campaign on the up swing; to be growing your strength as you hit the tape. Designing and executing the “end game” of a long season, especially when the contestants are so closely matched, is tricky business. In fact, the end game of many close contests often has less to do with planning than with luck; luck being the residue of hard work and preparation. A key moment – Mitt the Moderate returning in the Denver debate or Barry Zito finding his old magic in Game Five – can, however, tip the scale and change the trajectory of the long season.

You can’t exactly create The Big Mo, but you can capitalize on it when it happens. The first George Bush is the classic example of thinking that The Big Mo, in and of itself, is enough to power a team to victory. After Bush won the Iowa caucuses in 1980 he said, ‘”Now they will be after me, howling and yowling at my heels. What we will have is momentum. We will look forward to Big Mo being on our side, as they say in athletics.”

Bush eventually lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan in 1980, in part, because Reagan had a message and Bush had a resume. Bush also peaked too early. Claiming The Big Mo coming out of the very first campaign contest is a good deal different than claiming momentum in the last weeks of a torturously long campaign. Bush, in essence couldn’t capitalize on the momemtum he awarded himself and lost the very next contest, in New Hampshire, to Reagan.

Now the Detroit Tigers and the Obama campaign will frantically scramble to alter the momentum. Here’s betting that doing so will take an event – a lead-off homer in Game One for the Tigers or a bounce from the foreign policy debate for Obama, for example – to alter momentum. You can’t artifically create The Big Mo in sports or politics, you can take advantage of it when it magically, wonderfully and mysterious appears. Just ask the Cardinals.

 

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2012 Election, Obama, Reagan

If Obama Loses…

Oct 12th, 12 / 0 Comments

The final days of the agonizing long 2012 presidential campaign feature an incumbent president who can’t – or won’t – bring himself to employ the basic political necessity of every successful politician; an ability to sell yourself and your program and a shameless challenger who displays, more than anyone in recent American history, the audacity of re-invention. A Romney aide telegraphed months ago the “etch-a-sketch” re-make strategy that came to full effect in the first presidential debate.

 The astute political analyst Charlie Cook nailed the essence of Mitt Romney months ago when he said the GOP nominee is “unencumbered by principle.” But, Romney knows a smile, confidence and a certain swagger cover up a lot of missing principles.

 Obama, by contrast, appears more and more unencumbered by basic political skills like debating your opponent and talking sensibly about your priorities. Obama critics will say he has no program, but that’s unfair. For good or ill, he has signed historic legislation, but he just lacks the Bill Clinton-like skill to relate the art of governing to the drama of campaigning.

 If Obama joins William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush as modern presidents who failed to win a second term, the cause will involve six political failings or, in some cases, failures to address important issues that mark the president’s four years. Taken together they present a damning indictment of a guy who, at a basic level, doesn’t get – or like – politics.

 1)     Obama reminds me of many, let’s call them progressive, politicians who harbor the belief that the righteousness of our policies obviates the need to explain those policies on a clear, concise form that American voters understand. Obama has never been able – or willing – to reduce the essence of his historic health insurance legislation to a bumper sticker. Is the legislation about all Americans banding together to make certain that all of us have access to affordable care? Is it about regulating insurance companies? Is it about insuring that no one is denied insurance due to some pre-existing condition? Obama ceded the messaging about the singular accomplishment of his term to his opponents because he couldn’t make an effective argument for a policy that presidents going back to Teddy Roosevelt have called for. It is an astonishing failure at a basic level of political communications.

 2)     Obama also made a fundamental mistaking in granting way too much control over his legislative agenda to Nancy Pelosi and Congressional Democrats. The White House had the upper hand, including a Congressional majority, in the first two years of Obama’s presidency. Obama should have used public and private persuasion on Congress, but he never stooped to get his hands dirty in the inside game of Washington politics. For the most part the president was absent from the big strategy and message for the first two years and Pelosi set about proving she is a great politician for San Francisco, who doesn’t get Peoria. One wonders if Obama has read Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson or Woodrow Wilson’ disastrous approach to Congress in the post-World War I period. He should.

 3)     The president made a fundamental and gravely serious political mistake in not focusing like a laser on the economy in the wake of the 2008 election. Granted he did push a stimulus – and then failed to follow up and sell its benefits – but he also pivoted almost immediately from an economic focus to a health care focus. Health care should have waited. Obama neither got or attempted to get any credit for keeping the U.S. economy from going off a cliff in early 2009 and he continues to pay for that lack of political awareness. A modestly skilled political operative would have avoided such a mistake. The economy always comes first, just ask Hoover.

 4)     Amid much fanfare, Obama appointed a blue ribbon commission to recommend solutions to the nation’s fiscal and budget challenges and then walked away from the sensible recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson Commission. It was a major blunder on both substantive and political grounds. Congress would very likely not have embraced the essence of Bowles-Simpson, as indeed Pelosi and Co. refused to do, but had Obama embraced the Commission’s recommendations and held Erskine Bowles and Al Simpson close they would have given the president bipartisan political and policy cover during the entire campaign season. Should Obama have then won the election, he could have claimed a clear mandate to do something serious about the deficit, taxes and entitlements – a truly historic second-term agenda. As it turns out Obama’s fiscal and deficit approach is as vacuous as Romney’s. Failing to embrace his own Commission’s recommendation was a huge unforced political error.

 5)     Obama has never been clear about what caused the country’s near economic disaster in 2008. He has never spelled out why the country came so close to a second Great Depression and never really held anyone accountable. Faced with a similar set of circumstances in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt identified the villains as greedy bankers and Wall Street speculators. He went after them with regulation and rhetoric. Obama, again ceding the lead to Congress, let Barney Frank become the face of financial reform and regulation. Obama should have seized the moment to define a new vision for the American economy – as FDR did – and called out the hedge fund managers and engineers of credit default swaps. He should have defined his presidency by taking on the big banks and calling, as ironically Sanford Weill one of the biggest proponents of modern U.S. mega-banking has, for the breakup of the big banks. It would have been an historic and defining moment. The politically cautious Obama missed it.

 6)     All five of these political and policy failures converge now to create the single biggest Obama political problem – he has no convincing story to tell about his years in office and little to say about what a second term could look like. Skillful politicians are always thinking about how they talk about what they are trying to accomplish, who is hindering their efforts, who is to blame and what the future looks like. Obama lacks that political gene.

 If, as Maureen Dowd has written recently, Obama hates to sell himself or thinks that aspect of political leadership is beneath him he may well join Taft, Hoover and the others as “failed” modern presidents. After all, history does not treat one-termers very well and we do tend to reward the greatness of American presidents who display an ability to grow into the challenges the office presents. One wonders if Barack Obama, a man of obvious and substantial intellectual and rhetorical skills, can be self aware enough to know that being righteous in politics is never enough. His time is short.

 

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2012 Election, Obama