Skirkle, what do you think of this?

[Kuya]

http://www.thenation.com/article/156...-without-tears

Given the election results, the question Barack Obama has to decide for himself is whether he really wants to be president in the fullest sense. Not a moderator for earnest policy discussions. Not the national cheerleader for hope. Not the worthy visionary describing a distant future. Those qualities are elements in any successful presidency, and Obama applies them with admirable skill and seriousness.

What's missing with this president is power—a strong grasp of the powers he possesses and the willingness to govern the country with them. During the past two years, this missing quality has been consistently obvious in his rhetoric and substantive policy positions. There is a cloying Boy Scout quality in his style of leadership—the troop leader urging boys to work together on their merit badges—and none of the pigheaded stubbornness of his "I am the decider" predecessor, nor the hard steel of Lyndon Johnson or the guile of Richard Nixon.

Obama has patience and the self-confidence not to insist that his solution is the best and only one. On many vital questions, he went so far as to not even say what his solution was. Such a governing style is too nice for real-life politics, where Boy Scouts get their heads handed to them.

Perhaps because he was young and relatively inexperienced, Obama surrounded himself with savvy veterans of Washington's inside baseball. He inherited his economic advisers from Robert Rubin, his political team from former Senate leader Tom Daschle and center-right Clintonistas like Rahm Emanuel. Together with old friends from the academy, the administration was overstaffed with intellectual abstraction and short on street-smart politicians, especially any harboring liberal instincts. That pretty much ruled out the "change" many voters had expected. It produced a tone-deaf seminar of policy thinkers in which Obama assumed he was hearing all sides.

Even Obama supporters began to ask, Where is the fight in the man? Some critics blame a lack of courage, but that neglects the extraordinary nerve Obama displayed in his rise to the White House—a young black man with an unusual name and limited experience who triumphed through his audacity. Obama's governing style is a function of his biography—a man who grew up always in the middle, both black and white. He succeeded by learning rare skills, the ability to bridge different worlds comfortably and draw people together across racial, political and intellectual divides. He learned to charm and disarm, not to smash and conquer.

For the first time in his life, those qualities seem to have failed him. Indeed, he may have been misled by his high regard for his own talents. This is really his first encounter with devastating political defeat. The question now is, What will he learn from his "shellacking"? Possibly not much, since it is always very hard to rethink and adjust in midstream. But remember, this man is an unusually observant politician with a great thirst for self-reflection. One can reasonably hope that as he absorbs the hard knocks, he will make calculated changes in how he governs.

I suggest you read all of it.

[Conrad]

I've always had issues with Obama's seeming lack of assertion -- he talks a big game about all the things he plans to do, but actually pushing his issues and forcing Congress to enact them has been a problem, especially considering he has had a united Congress for his entire term up to this point. He's trying to lead by consensus, and it isn't working, especially when he himself is a polarizing figure through sheer virtue of his skin color. I completely agree with this article, as much as it pains me to admit it. I don't yet know if Obama is a failure, though -- I just think that his "let's all get compromise and get along" strategies aren't going to work and make him look naive.

[Lucienne]

Well, he's also too arrogant and sure of himself to see his own shortcomings, which I guess is a common character for any leader, but comes out as particularly unfortunate in this case. He won't get anywhere unless he stops believing that he can actually change the world. It's wonderful to have faith in the world when you're 20, at the age of 49 you really should know better. That article is depressingly accurate.
And even worse, here I am promoting pragmatism. <.< >.>

[Conrad]

He is the President. I should hope that he believes he can change the world.

[Lucienne]

Well, he can and he can't. He can enforce changes, but essentially, he cannot change the minds of people. The best he can do is have a bigger impact than you or me. It's nice to see the good in people, but you have to be aware that you'll need to come with a whip to get it out of them.

[Mertron]

i do what the brain slug tells me to do

[Rocl]

i really wish you would just drop fucking dead

[Rocl]

not spaghetts

[Kuya]

Just 20 days after his inauguration, with Republicans trying to block his stimulus bill, President Obama refused to acknowledge that he had underestimated how hard it would be to change the way Washington works.

But as the president returned home on Sunday to face an even more rigidly divided capital, Mr. Obama went even further by blaming himself for failing to do what he had repeatedly promised — change the tone in Washington.

He said his own “obsessive” focus on implementing the right policies had led him to ignore a part of the reason voters handed him a mandate in 2008.

“I neglected some things that matter a lot to people, and rightly so: maintaining a bipartisan tone in Washington,” he told reporters in a brief question-and-answer session aboard Air Force One as he returned from a 10-day trip to Asia. “I’m going to redouble my efforts to go back to some of those first principles,” he promised.

Mr. Obama told reporters that he “very confident” that voters this month were not casting ballots for gridlock.

“They are not going to want to just obstruct, that they’re going to want to engage constructively,” he said of his Republican adversaries. “And then we’re going to have a whole bunch of time next year for some serious philosophical debates.”

I hate him so fucking much.

[Kuya]

He says he pursued the right policy, but he just went about the tone the wrong way.

He says that when people wanted to change the way washingston did things, that they meant they wanted more kumbaya.

What a fucking faggot.

[Kuya]

People don't want to change the tone, you self important oreo, they want the government to actually implement policy that makes their lives better, not just incrementally, you pedantic motherfucker

[Conrad]

well it's not going to happen instantly

[Conrad]

However, because of the new healthcare plan I can now be insured through my mom's plan for the next three years, so that's kind of immediate change that improves my life

[Kuya]

Sure, you see something coming out of it inmediately, and so do i, unfortunately, two criticisms can be made:

1. Either the health care reform was not enough to actually win sufficient public support.

2. Or the party did not manipulate discourse well enough to make it seem like the reform was enough.

Both of these criticisms tie into the party's seeming inability to understand why they are losing.

[Kuya]

An inability they demonstrate when they insist that the reason they're getting beat is because they weren't bipartisan enough or that they went too far to the left. The least they could understand is that they are losing because the economy sucks. They're not perceiving a lack of bipartisanship, they're perceiving failure.

[Kuya]

If he keeps insisting that his goal is bipartisanship, but fails at it, people will see it, not as a failure on the Republican's part for being intransigent, but a failure on his part for failing to deliver on what he supposedly promised.

[Kuya]

I don't think this problem can solely be blamed on Obama and the Democrats; look at Britain and look at Greece: You have supposedly leftist parties doing things that can barely be called leftist. The English Labour party and the Greek Socialist party. Evidently, we're dealing with something that is probabily systematic and it has to do both with the economic system at a global scale and our instruments of governance including political parties.

[Conrad]

It's also in part because the Republicans have been successful in diminishing Obama's wins and highlighting his losses. I don't think many people know that the health care bill was in fact quite progressive, but is a perceived failure because it lacked the public option that the GOP defeated.

[Kuya]

Granted, in Greece's case, the socialist party probably didn't have much of a choice in following austerity meassures given Greece's status in Europe.

[Conrad]

I don't agree with his fervent and almost foolish attempt at insisting upon bipartisanship. He really needs to understand that the GOP is not going to give at all, and he really needs to bare his teeth in the second half of this term if he has any hope of being elected.

That, or fund the Palin 2012 campaign.