President Obama - 2012

    Ironically or strangely depending how you want to look at it, President Obama is a leader who hasn't always seemed to entirely understand the movement he was leading.  He called for change and used the terminology of a great reformer but didn't really mean it.  He actually imagined himself a marginal reformer, and instead of the wholesale change that the country thought he was calling for he only envisioned offering adjustments, a tweaking of the system, a rotating the tires, changing the oil and a wash and wax, rather than a complete tune-up and overhaul.
    Obama promised change but misunderstood the resonance of his own message.  He thought he was the change, and as a black American his election was socially revolutionary, but the people were less concerned with the symbolism of his presidency than with the actuality of the long overdo reforms they expected him to deliver and have not seen forthcoming. Obama has had little sympathy with the desire of his supporters, however, actually showing ingratitude mixed with impatience toward them due to their lack of gratitude and growing impatience with him - to the point of being publicly dismissive of their goals. Compare the lack of regard Obama shows for his base with the incredible devotion the republicans show to theirs, even when the demands of the extreme right (so far right they are wrong) are untenable tending to irrational, and you'll be astonished.  To imagine George W. Bush dismissing the extreme wing of his party as the "professional" right as Obama (or at least his spokesman did without rebuke) did to the left is inconceivable.
    So, Obama's supporter's are upset.  They think he is moving too slowly. True.  But there is a fine art of leadership in a democracy only ever mastered by a very few. When properly done democracy frustrates everyone a little, which is generally a sign of health rather than stagnancy. To achieve momentous things, not just temporary advancements, you must lead the aggregate population toward broad based change rather than just lead one faction to the trough of its own narrow preferences. For if one takes one's oath to serve all Americans equally seriously and truly respects the dual political polarities that make up our electoral spectrum then - like an old, ill-fitting window sitting loose in its sash, that must be raised back and forth one side after the other to be raised at all - simple mindless partisanship must be transcended which requires far greater skill and patience in order to achieve real growth.  For only that program which accounts for and respects both sides of our ongoing political argument allows the country to move with measured speed ahead. A good democratic leader must take a wide swathe of the majority into account while he or she painstakingly massages public opinion in the appropriate direction which best comports with their own best instincts.
    It wasn't just that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it's that he chose the proper time to promulgate the decree that freed the slaves.  Clearly now, though he was much abused at the time by those who wished he would have moved faster (and reviled later by those who wished he had never moved at all), we see that to have done so sooner would have jeopardized his ability to do so at all. Close study of our best presidents like Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt exhibit almost the exact type of widespread discomfort with their resolve and impatience at their speed that Obama's supporters now register toward him.  Only in retrospect can the achievements of such presidents be accurately gauged. Therefore the republicans' "conservative agenda" which is designed to split the country and divide and conquer in order to profit a few but but never all and often not even many, has never achieved one single policy which is broad based enough to actually endure.  They have put all their legislative eggs in one side of the electorate's basket which can be, should be and will be replaced by a much broader vision as soon as someone capable enough arises to implement it. Yet they hold onto their injudicious positions like death itself and in election after election seek not consensus but a bare divisive, strategic, magical minimum of barely 50%.  It must almost hurt to consistently seek and settle for so little as this.
    Obama's credulous devotion to bipartisanship in his Health Care legislation at the beginning of his first term is a mutant variant on this tendency to inclusiveness.  Passing health care was a great achievement but was made more difficult by his penchant for bipartisanship. Bipartisanship in itself is no particular virtue if it is not sincere in its desire to broaden a piece of legislation and make it more properly inclusive.  In this case, however, trying to expand support for this legislation to make it less vulnerable to attack only succeeded in making more vulnerable. Instead of crafting the best bill he could with only democratic votes, which he presumably might have done, and then bearing those consequences, he actually narrowed its appeal and made it less flexible and inclusive in its final form.  It was a vain (in both senses of the word) and quixotic attempt to achieve minimal republican support rather than a valid attempt at achieving  greater legislative excellence that motivated the attempt. Seeking consensus prior to achieving revolutionary reform is something of an oxymoron.
    As if he was wielding a witching stick of bipartisanship he gravitated his argument to absolutely the weakest point on the political spectrum he could possibly find and still see health care passed which produced a hybrid concoction which pleased no one. And to be honest, I'm probably not alone in being unable to recall if he did achieve one or two republican votes and can't be bothered to look it up, because it never mattered anyway. To pretend this bill was bipartisan when everyone knew it wasn't was nothing but a pyrrhic gimmick which cost far more in the bill's perfection than was achieved by compensation in the public perception.  In fact, it took so long in the process that like, Hemingway's Old Man in the Sea, the great legislative fish he caught took so long to get to shore that every shark in the sea had had at it by then and in the public's mind had all but been picked clean before it was ever landed. 
    The result is that the signature piece of legislation in President Obama's first term wins him little public credit, though those who claim it is not a great and necessary and long overdo legislative step forward for our society are wrong. It will wear well as a great achievement, just not as good a political accomplishment as it should have been.
    Clearly the republicans played him, even President Obama has allowed as much. Some republicans, a precious few to be sure, pretended to want a bipartisan agreement.  They didn't of course.  They only wanted to pretend to their districts back home that they were objective servants of the people.  Then they pulled out after months of time-delaying haggling supposedly over concern that expanded health care for the people had nothing to do with the overall improved health of the country, when in fact they are intrinsically connected. Sick people don't make for a well nation.  
    When one of the last out the door, Olympia Snowe, with sly disingenuity after months of debilitating dithering atop decades of futility at trying to reform health care, repeated the current republican attack line word for word and said she didn't understand "what the rush was" (when the whole country knew what the rush was), you knew she could have never been serious about reform to begin with.  Or after Charles Grassley, another republican pseudo participant in the negotiations dropped out and immediately started dissembling about someone "pulling the plug on grandma" you knew the fix was in.  This in a nutshell sums up how much the republicans really valued democratic bipartisanship. Seldom have such dishonest intentions been so unambiguously displayed. Stings work best when the mark never catches on how he has been taken in. 
    Still, even though President Obama knew he had been had he didn't learn his lesson and let the republicans, via John Boehner, roll him again in the debt ceiling, government shut down crisis. There again the President gave concessions publicly in advance to achieve a broad agreement that the republicans had no intention of meeting, immediately repudiating the negotiations after having given in on no concessions of their own.  One wonders if this president has finally grown to understand that whatever else may be true, the republicans do not mean him well.  They are more than willing to harm the country by means of hurting him and are far more avid about having their jobs, especially his, than doing them when they get them.  If president Obama is reelected he must absolutely stand for something more than - and he will not be reelected until he does - a pathological desire to compromise with those who have a pathological desire not to compromise with him.

The Drowning Man Strategy    

    But in an odd, counterintuitive way these tactical failures may have been a blessing in disguise.  If Obama has a fault - just ask his supporters - it is his great penchant for preemptive compromise.  However, consistently giving the republicans what they want has only made them ever greedy for more.  By this time there is no compromise the most extreme of them will ever accept, thinking an even greater capitulation will be forthcoming.  To their detriment this has shown them up for what they are.  Users and abusers of our system of government.  There is not an honest bone of governance in their body politic, it is win at all costs-to the nation.  As their policies have left them more and more exposed to the public, the subtler minds among them have tried to restrain them, which has in turn exposed fractures within their coalition.
    In Obama's case a certain benign passivity, of not overreacting to provocation and a supremely confident ability to let large issues ripen, is actually a rare leadership quality.  To let the opponents of progress play themselves out, to watch their arguments, however belligerently and provocatively and insultingly they are aired, float about and pollute the atmosphere for a while before their odious odor finally dissipates with their merit, is often actually the most efficacious means to progress through difficult trials and circumstances.  The direct ego-satisfying confrontation of bare bones politics is not only messier but often less comprehensive in its solution. Though more immediately rewarding to some, in the long run unnecessary turmoil and recrimination however satisfying it seems at the time, makes the work progress even more slowly. Sometimes only by letting an argument fully expand within the context of time, like gaining an aerial perspective on a rugged landscape, can you identify the proper route to take through the endless thickets of possibility and achieve a more farsighted and sustainable level of advancement with any degree of accuracy. The best way to clear unruly opponents out is to give them enough rope to hang their theories on and then, like Mohammed Ali, rope-a-dope them, which is something that they believe they are doing to you which in fact is actually something you are doing to them.  
    Clearly Boehner and McCollum are among the worst and most hapless we have ever seen at their positions. They have been rope-a-doped. By always taking the easiest and most obvious and ultimately most onerous angle of partisan attack they have actually boxed themselves into their own corners. Meanwhile Obama is dancing around the ring, virtually unopposed and unscathed by any intelligent argument of the opposition, while they cower and mutter in their corners unable to even control their own people.  No one has really ever laid a hard blow on Obama yet, they just thought they had.  They have, however, kept him from achieving his ultimate success by obstreperous obstructionism and ceaseless rearguard maneuvering, which achieves nothing but delays everything.  
    This has left congress at its most despised level in history, which includes both parties to be sure, but with a lower level of regard reserved for republicans.  The question for democrats is how to convince the public to finally make the GOP pay for its cynicism. Whereas the republican strategy seems to be that of the Drowning Man Pathology, sure he will sink but determined to take everyone who tries to help down to the bottom with him.  And it's true, democrats in congress only rank slightly higher than republicans in their approval, but that's still a positive differential, which in normal electoral terms is meaningful.  If the numbers were more presentable, say in the range of 40-50% approval, the party on the losing end of the difference would be concerned but the republicans seem to think that because everyone's numbers are so low they will be somehow inoculated from coming out the loser in two way races all around the country.  Perhaps there's logic here but it sounds like a football team convincing itself that its somehow more admirable to lose by two touchdowns in a low scoring game than losing by three touchdown in a high scoring game.  In politics a loss is a loss, and however you cut it, they are still losing. Obama too, has suffered a malaise from the congressional inactivity and bad atmospherics but both he and the democrats still have a shorter rise to 50% than the republicans do with a lot more buoyancy and far less baggage.  Therefore, the republicans are engaged in a blatantly self-destructive strategy, one that seems designed by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but at the end of the day still signifying nothing, but failure.    
    The difference here cannot be overstressed  - ignored by the common press that avoids moral principles the way a dog's tail flails at flies.  Obama has actually been seen from time to time putting the interests of the country over his own and even over his party, while the republicans have put self-invested political interests over the interests of the nation time and again.  Of course, everyone generally does put their own self-interest first, even when they imagine themselves consumed with magnanimity; that is not a surprise.  But in choosing a leader for the country, unless you are of a very select set, your best interests will  most often be served by what serves the country best.  A leader who wears his crying greed on his sleeve, shouting "every woman and man for themselves" as he loots your burning house with you still in it, has a more limited appeal, particularly in straightened times, than one who is consistently seen trying to save the women and children first. 
    In short, Obama through his due diligence over these four years has staked out the pole position.  Blur issues as they may, ultimately this is what the nation will see through all the bombast and fog.  Therefore in the upcoming election most of the policy particulars, character issues and programs for the future, will be seen as only facets of this central tenet: Obama is a far more responsible and trustworthy steward of the nation's health and future than the alternative.  Once they try to break down the centrality of Obama's core position, the republican candidates will be tempted to riskier and more far-fetched claims against him, and put forward increasingly novel legislative prescriptions and countless contradictory proposals.  It's what losers do before they lose.  This is a feature which has already been well established in the republican debates designed to choose a standard bearer.  It will be in the shoals among these follies, caricatures and mischaracterizations that the eventual candidate is sure to founder.
    Even health care legislation, whether or not you agree entirely with its methodology, was something done with the good of the country in mind, whereas its opponents remain wedded to the existing system's massive inefficiencies and injustice which profit a few, inconvenience most and completely ignore as if they were pariahs a significant minority of the population.  Similarly, something like the Bush tax cuts could and should be seen as something grasping and self interested in the extreme, favoring the few over the many. It was crafted specifically to enrich the fabled 1% over the 99% though some money, accidentally we must presume, may have trickled down a ways, clearly the malevolent design was to keep the majority of the nation's profits flowing ever upwards, never back down. 
     While his style of leadership is laid back as opposed to someone who was an inveterate grandstander say, like George W. Bush (think of his signature "Mission Accomplished" moment) whose administration never let an irrelevant subtlety go unhighlighted nor left an important fact unslighted.  The Bush administration was self-congratulatory in the extreme, and tried to make his presidency more about the president than the nation.   In these amplified times that is not to a leader's credit.  Crude adherence to a personality in the short term will never be quite as gratifying or enduring to a nation as considered allegiance to a more capacious philosophy over the long haul.  Though Obama's leadership diffuses credit and is not always as simplistically creditable, upon proper reflection, it will wear far better. And faced with a choice, his type of leadership is not only preferable in a time of crisis but will almost always prevail.

The Dam Republicans

This is not to say that President Obama hasn't made mistakes.  Our system usually rewards a simple consistent theme or two which a political campaign must be woven around. More cerebral candidates and campaigns sometimes struggle with this and lose the thread of their own argument somewhere in the sewing.  Obama certainly has had a hard time phrasing issues simply and starkly enough for popular black and white consumption. He is a consummate ameliorator, consistently trying to round the edges off wedge issues.  The republicans do a far better job at sharpening the same issues he is trying to soften.  Unfortunately this is their only gift, as they seem to do little else well at all, and never actually desire to solve any of the wedge issues they constantly hone. On the other hand democrats like to believe that Americans will always respond to a well reasoned argument once it's been well  put forward once (or twice for the slow witted) - but they don't.   
    It doesn't mean you are a propagandist if when you make a good point, if it is good, you repeat it.  Any good point can bear repeating and often does, even again and again. Obama has exhibited little patience for this kind of educable give and take with the nation.  
    This seems to be a truth that Obama has a had time accepting as even when his administration has a winning argument they may repeat it several times, and then it is heard no more.  Repetition is not the behavior of a simpleton, gibberish is.  Repetition is sometimes the outward manifestation of a sound mind; if it is right it is right, if it works it works, why change it just for the novelty of saying something else?  Too often Obama seems to get bored with the tiresome arguments put forward against him and rather than dignify them with wasted time in refutation, merely gives in to them or lets them fester until they've grown to perceptions.  For a while democrats used the slogan of "do-nothing" republicans to describe the behavior of their opponents.  It seemed to be gaining some traction.  But then they grew bored, they were outlasted, and quit repeating themselves even though the obstructionist behavior has not stopped but if anything has grown worse.
    This is weakness in fact as well as in the public's mind.  President Obama must not only do a better job framing his messages, he must not flinch from contrast, though it seems foreign to his nature. So far in his first term he has done an admirable job turning the other cheek and blunting the sharp edges of his policies by rounding contentious issues off with compromise.
     Refusing to get completely mired in destructive acrimony he has tried to rise above partisanship but now he must realize that he is the leader of his own party.  All of our great presidents were able to not lead the country but do so relying on the solid agency of their own party as their base.  Presidents like FDR and Reagan were avidly partisan and yet able to avoid fulfilling the worst of their party's pretensions while achieving approval of a large majority of Americans and earning the admiration of both. The worst thing Obama can be is indifferent, a small bore reformer, which is exactly what he will be if he forever tries to stand above the fray.
  Still, his overall record is admirable.  The wars he inherited are winding down.  His foreign policy, unlike Bush, is notable both for its success and for its lack of excess.  al Qaeda is on the run and the US is finally becoming a progressive supporter of revolutionary change in the world again, not as Wolfowitz and Cheney would have had it - as neo colonialist plunderers and military invaders, but as real partners who can confidently stand to patiently wait and profit vicariously from the continued expansion of freedom around the globe.  His only sticking point is the economy.  But even that has finally shown signs of starting to turn around.  If in eight months it is off the front pages the republicans won't have a single legitimate thread of attack against the Obama administration.
    Ironically the second area of weakness he has as we approach the 2012 election is of his own making.  It is in his difficulty of connecting with the people which has led to the greatest residual doubts about the viability of his candidacy for his second term.  This has made him seem an enigma to his friends, weaker than he really is to his enemies and suspicious to the independents.  Fortunately for him events outside his presidency have come to his aid to suggest his platform.  The urgency of the Occupy Wall Street movement has, in the same way the Tea Party movement hurt him in the off election, helped him identify a few salient points which should enable him to connect much better with the people.  There are signs he is already taking this to heart and sharpening his message accordingly. This is ironic because his ability to communicate is his greatest skill.  It serves a purpose only when it is used, however.  Though it should worry the republicans that in a campaign where he will be compelled to speak he will be at his best. He has oratorical skills far beyond any would-be opponent. 
    On the other hand he has his opponent's party dead to rights as dead dog obstructionists.  And if anything the push for change which swept him into election has only grown stronger as it is remained unrequited.  President Obama is still, if he can sell it, the one most likely to bring forth the change the public desires.  Counter that with the republican party's policy of debt, negativity, division and gridlock; a party that only lives for bad news, which if it doesn't have it invents - impeachments, permanent filibusters, government shutdowns, terror scares, etc., and Obama still looks like a guiding light to the future.  It is time to finish the job that the republican obstructionists have tried their best to prohibit him from doing.  But he needs to go on the attack for this, and there are signs that he is starting to rise to the challenge.  After all when your opponent keeps climbing their morbidly obese self farther and farther out on a flimsier and flimsier limb sooner or later you owe it to yourself, heck, you owe it to them, to saw it off under them.
    Nothing is now more obvious as the republicans and Boehner have had to swallow their pride and back off from yet another phony self-generated crisis, this time over the two month extension of the payroll tax reduction.  Without going into any details, they were caught with their pants down (or kilts up, as it may be, as they were rather bizarrely invoking the film Braveheart, no less, about Scottish insurrectionists who not only lost the war but saw their leader drawn and quartered - sorry John) or with their hand in the piggy bank stealing pennies - whichever image you prefer - after months of denying it was them stealing all the pennies.  
    In retrospect this capitulation will be seen as a key moment (yesterday, December 22, as I finish writing this) on which the election turned.  This will lead to another drop in congressional republican poll numbers and further prove Obama's point about their obstructionism and make it more and more difficult for them to continue with their signature, self-defeating policy of do-nothingism in the future, as the blame for legislative failure will be ever more quickly assigned to them for any delays from this point on.   
    Meanwhile republicans are still banking on banking to pull them through.  They have done this before.  Nicholas Biddle was head of the US bank (the privately held precursor of the Federal Reserve) and he tried to wreck the American economy to prove Andrew Jackson in the wrong (even while graphically proving his point) for not being willing to recharter his bank because Jackson thought it had too much economic might.  And Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover refused to rescue the economy from the jaws of the Great Depression if it would have inconvenienced them or their friends preconceptions in the least, before being swept aside by FDR.  The republican party has held the American economy hostage before in order to keep a preferential agenda favorable to the few but detrimental to the many.  
    Today again, there is an economic drought, massive discrepencies in wealth and poverty are expanding.  It's the same old story.  Those who would hoard the water of money and the beneficial privileges that this affords them but have never really earned or deserved, are refusing to open the dam's floodgates though the countryside downstream is parched, the economy thirsts, businesses are closing and the crops drying up.  Meanwhile the flood water held back by these Dam Republicans continues to build, cracks are showing in the dike, tiny rivulets of water snake down the sides of the dangerously bulging concrete pilasters of their policies, meant to last generations, but now there are no longer even enough fingers to plug the holes. Not even "Dutch" Reagan could do it.      
   And even after all of the obvious problems we face they still are trying to keep government all dammed up, hands tied behind its back, and won't release the pressure on the economy even to save the creaking, cracking superstructure of their damn artificial dam policies.  But the rain up country continues to fall unabated, water levels continue to swell.  Yet every candidate in the republican primary for the presidency seeking to run against Obama, is calling for more tax cuts for the very, very well to do, even when it clearly necessitates raising taxes on the middle class and denying services to the needy.  Still the dam muckety mucks of the party are damming up property downstream, buying up lots and building expensive homes on the banks of the pretty little streams of their own delusions below the towering dam as if there were no tomorrow possible from the way things were yesterday.  This is highly damming behavior. And they will be damned for it. 
    That said, Obama should win this upcoming election hands down. Though this is not perhaps as bold a projection as it may seem now, I admit, after everyone has had a peek ahead to the projected opposition, few elections seem easier to handicap.  Of course, anything may happen (my requisite disclaimer) but if the democrats in congress could put some separation between themselves and the even more despised republicans in congress, by say, actually proposing a platform of real, meaningful, across the board reforms, the republicans could be heading for real trouble this fall. But, because they have a tendency to live in their own echo chamber, I guarantee you they will be the last ones to see it coming.