Newsweek recently printed a piece questioning whether the job of President of the United States is too big and complex for one person to manage. Online comments to the article are often hateful, racially-charged, or involve 7th grade name calling.
Fawning over Obama never truly helped him. Even Hillary Clinton underestimated the importance of early success in caucuses and the momentum that got him nominated. Using GW Bush as a foil instead of focusing on McCain was helpful in the general election but serves little purpose once the reigns were in Obama's hands. It is his to clean up. You can blame others once or twice. Then you have to govern. All Presidents start off with the baggage left behind. Surely, President Obama and his staff knew that. The question is what they do with problems created by the old Administration or new problems. The economic crisis was not of Obama's making, nor were foreign policy and military blunders. GW Bush, with little or no help from John McCain and support from then-candidate or President-elect Obama, set up our initial response to the economic/credit crisis. We all have a right to expect a statute of limitations on blaming prior administrations for every failure of the current one. Otherwise, the message is of blame, not hope. If that's what some Democrats are doing, voters will surely sense it and vote accordingly. If Republicans attempt to take advantage of big issues that are unresolvable in one term, they run the same risk in the next election cycle. People who vote regularly tend to be older and have the sophistication to understand the difference. I do not believe the modern presidency is too overwhelming for one President. The roots of Obama's problems are aloofness, lack of visibility and the huge risk he took in pushing his agenda almost solely based on the votes of Democrats. We won't know if it paid off until the spring of 2012. We won't know what issues will be the biggest or whether Obama will deserve credit for steering the country for 3+ years or will have confidence in giving him a second term.
Name-calling in the meantime will not fix anything. Americans voters are often impatient people, including me. Bill Clinton was written off in 1994 but was handily reelected in 1996. Ronald Reagan was written off in 1983 but overwhelmingly won another term the next year. To me, the two big priorities right now are taking rational steps to increase job creation and stablilize the economy and to either make important strides toward or actually resolving Middle East issues. The Presidency is certainly an exhausting, frustrating job but I do not believe Barack Obama is unable to handle it. What troubles me more than that portion of the debate is trashing politicians on the basis of where they went to school.
Most Presidents in modern times, with the exception of Reagan and Johnson, either had a West Point or Ivy-League education. Obama and Clinton lacked wealth but went to elite universities because they were innately smart. I thought that was what we wanted: a nation that rewarded boot-strappers. GW Bush has an MBA from Harvard and did his undergraduate work at Yale. Many people have concluded that the younger Bush was Ivy League because his father intervened to make it happen. I have no idea whether that is true or not but it doesn't matter at this point, if it ever did. If you voted for GW Bush and think he did a good job, you can't say Obama is an elitist or broadbrush every politician as out of touch because they went to an elite college or university. There is nothing dishonorable about attending less prestigious schools, nor do Ivy League graduates have a lock on intellect and problem-solving skills.
Even Sarah Palin - on the six or seven year plan after hopscotching through a number of second or third tier schools - should not be cut out of the political process because she didn't go to Harvard. The problem is not the school(s). The problem is the lack of lifelong curiosity and the inability to admit when you lack knowledge on a subject but refuse to consider new ideas and change your mind without licking a finger and sticking it up in the air to determine which way the political wind is blowing.
There is some history to suggest that some politicians actually can change their minds. Robert Kennedy comes to mind. He didn't seem to have much of a problem with our country's involvement in Vietnam until the middle and late 1960s. Cynics may say he changed his mind to have a viable opportunity to be elected President or because he hated Johnson. I sincerely doubt those were the main reasons he shifted to the left. Yes, Lyndon Johnson's handling of the war was about has ham-handed as it could be but Kennedy knew there remained a huge conservative consituency that would make his run very difficult, especially considering that his brother had escalated the war before Johnson was sworn in in 1963. They were all Cold Warriors back then and continued to believe there would be a domino effect if they did nothing. RFK was in on almost every major decision his brother made. Had he lived to debate Nixon, you can bet Nixon would have attempted to shred him for being a hypocrite. He might have got a lot of traction out of it. Sadly, we'll never know for sure but that isn't the point. The point is that smart people, from whatever alma mater, can listen, learn, grow and change. Don't forget that Hillary Clinton had been a Goldwater Girl before she entered Wellesley in 1965 and by the time she was finished with law school at Yale she was assisting the Senate in the effort to expose Watergate and impeach Nixon. If that is not change, I don't know what is.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Shall We Meet for Tea at 4?
American voters show each other over and over again how fickle they are. They say they want change and when a Presidential candidate articulates the type of change he would work toward, describes what he would do in Iraq and Afghanistan, knows the world economy is in the toilet before he is even elected and undertakes to address those issues, suddenly voters say "wait a minute; we weren't that serious about change".
Democrats took a huge political risk in passing bold legislation with no Republican support in the House and very little in the Senate. They set themselves up to be unfairly viewed as steamrollers, entirely ignoring Republicans. That was never true. Republicans made their own wager, assuming their lock-step failure to support any change proposed by Democrats would give them easy cover when the economy did not bounce back from a nearly catastrophic global recession in two years. Few thinking people believed it would but the Republicans were right in assuming the average voter expected it would.
As cynical as that appears, Democrats needed to listen more to their constituencies and, perhaps, slow down the pace of change. Nancy Pelosi might have been too good at her job or she might have been in over her head, depending on how one looks at the job. She certainly - with help - whipped her fellow Democrats into line and was tough on Republicans. She claims she tried to reach across the aisle but, even as a moderate Democrat, I did not see much of that. Governing should not be about humiliating one's opponents but for the last couple of decades, it is exactly how the game has been played. For those of us who believe that the policy choices were right, particularly not permitting the country and the world to slip into a full-blown depression, the question is not whether Democrats are bold enough and smart enough to devise long-term solutions to problems. The question is whether the majority of voters really want long-term solutions or would rather stick with what they know: sloganeering masquerading as policy, name-calling as a stand-in for explaining different approaches and a throw-the-rascals-out mantra that leads us to having a revolving door of rascals going in and out of office.
We could easily call Tea Party Republicans a right-wing group of disaffected, frightened people who were used by powerful interest groups to halt any meaningful policy change. With all of the technology, media outlets and competition for television viewers, most of us prefer catchy names that conjure up an image with no explanation. Most of us are too bombarded with garbage to take the time to consider anything more sophisticated than can fit on a bumper sticker. And, frankly, most Tea Party adherents hate Democrats because so many of us smugly consider ourselves smarter, better educated and better prepared to lead. Take yourself back to high school. The smart kids usually hung around together, studied, did well on their college boards and went on to university. The less smart kids hung around together, smoked in the parking lot, loathed the penny-loafered "rich" kids, lobbing insults at them while some of their friends dropped out of high school or community college before getting a degree which, of course, made it almost a certainty they would be the most economically vulnerable adults. A precious few of them quietly went on to college even though it was a struggle. We call them moderately conservative swing voters. I don't see much difference here.
It all comes down to what I believe is the development of a certain kind of deafness and lack of connection that afflicts powerful elected officials. It certainly afflicts Republicans and Democrats but when the party in power is afflicted, it's a fair bet they'll be taught a lesson, especially during an off-year election. The kids smoking in the parking lot grew up. They're still pissed off. Maybe they have a right to be. The problem is the reason they're still pissed off is - whether they realize it or not - right wing Republicans voted against nearly every piece of legislation that may have helped them find better, more plentiful jobs, opportunities for post-high school education and health care. In other words, by permitting an underclass to exist, cynical politicians and special interest groups can corral them in times of electoral crisis and persuade them to vote against their own interest.
Democrats took a huge political risk in passing bold legislation with no Republican support in the House and very little in the Senate. They set themselves up to be unfairly viewed as steamrollers, entirely ignoring Republicans. That was never true. Republicans made their own wager, assuming their lock-step failure to support any change proposed by Democrats would give them easy cover when the economy did not bounce back from a nearly catastrophic global recession in two years. Few thinking people believed it would but the Republicans were right in assuming the average voter expected it would.
As cynical as that appears, Democrats needed to listen more to their constituencies and, perhaps, slow down the pace of change. Nancy Pelosi might have been too good at her job or she might have been in over her head, depending on how one looks at the job. She certainly - with help - whipped her fellow Democrats into line and was tough on Republicans. She claims she tried to reach across the aisle but, even as a moderate Democrat, I did not see much of that. Governing should not be about humiliating one's opponents but for the last couple of decades, it is exactly how the game has been played. For those of us who believe that the policy choices were right, particularly not permitting the country and the world to slip into a full-blown depression, the question is not whether Democrats are bold enough and smart enough to devise long-term solutions to problems. The question is whether the majority of voters really want long-term solutions or would rather stick with what they know: sloganeering masquerading as policy, name-calling as a stand-in for explaining different approaches and a throw-the-rascals-out mantra that leads us to having a revolving door of rascals going in and out of office.
We could easily call Tea Party Republicans a right-wing group of disaffected, frightened people who were used by powerful interest groups to halt any meaningful policy change. With all of the technology, media outlets and competition for television viewers, most of us prefer catchy names that conjure up an image with no explanation. Most of us are too bombarded with garbage to take the time to consider anything more sophisticated than can fit on a bumper sticker. And, frankly, most Tea Party adherents hate Democrats because so many of us smugly consider ourselves smarter, better educated and better prepared to lead. Take yourself back to high school. The smart kids usually hung around together, studied, did well on their college boards and went on to university. The less smart kids hung around together, smoked in the parking lot, loathed the penny-loafered "rich" kids, lobbing insults at them while some of their friends dropped out of high school or community college before getting a degree which, of course, made it almost a certainty they would be the most economically vulnerable adults. A precious few of them quietly went on to college even though it was a struggle. We call them moderately conservative swing voters. I don't see much difference here.
It all comes down to what I believe is the development of a certain kind of deafness and lack of connection that afflicts powerful elected officials. It certainly afflicts Republicans and Democrats but when the party in power is afflicted, it's a fair bet they'll be taught a lesson, especially during an off-year election. The kids smoking in the parking lot grew up. They're still pissed off. Maybe they have a right to be. The problem is the reason they're still pissed off is - whether they realize it or not - right wing Republicans voted against nearly every piece of legislation that may have helped them find better, more plentiful jobs, opportunities for post-high school education and health care. In other words, by permitting an underclass to exist, cynical politicians and special interest groups can corral them in times of electoral crisis and persuade them to vote against their own interest.
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