President Obama has not acted like the national leader of a movement and national leader of a political party that is going to make some radical changes in government and economic politics the people had hoped and voted for and so far President Obama has not demonstrated the ability to present his views clearly to the masses of ordinary people who do not have PHD's or other college degrees.
David Bromwich nailed it when he wrote:
Pragmatic justifications have been offered to explain his aversion to any contest that implies a clash of opposing interests. Thus Rahm Emanuel said of the disastrously time-wasting courtship of Republican support for the stimulus package: "The public wants bipartisanship. We just have to try. We don't have to succeed." But try every time and you will waste your life. And when did the public say it wanted bipartisanship? The last fair measure was the election of 2008; and the public then gave a convincing majority to one party.
"His pragmatism is what is overwhelming him," said Obama's Chicago doctor about his approach to health care. A surprising and accurate insight. Pragmatism is supposed to trim; but taken to the circuitous lengths Obama allows, pragmatism is another word for the compulsive propitiation of unnecessary partners. It expands the work and blunts the achievement of reform. This president wants to move big, but he also wants to move slow; he wants to start a great change, but not to be the prime mover. So we get the large announcements: Guantanamo will close at once, Israel will freeze settlements, health care will be made reasonable. The president tries to line up all of his forces, all together -- and do it with so finely tuned an understanding he can't possibly be wrongly portrayed. But while he is working in the background in foreign policy, or leaving things to Congress in domestic affairs, those who are angry, Cheney, Limbaugh, Netanyahu, the big insurers, say what they please. They don't much care whether it is true. The errors "take," as errors will.
Like none of his predecessors, Obama seeks the part but disclaims the signature of a lawgiver. It may be that he mistakes politics for religion -- not less than everyone (he thinks) must share the credit for the great deed. Yet sometimes, also, he mistakes politics for physics. His larger policies have had as their premise: "Things can't go on as they have" -- as if it were a question of natural necessity. In Iraq, this was self-evident; visible reality handed him the change he stood for. Elsewhere the premise is not self-evident. And, good as Obama is in person, a resonant speaker, an impressive master of details once the details are in, he has not yet explained a single major policy in advance with the accessible clarity Paul Krugman brought to health care simply by listing its four elements: regulation, mandate, subsidy, public option. Such explanations should not have to wait for the intervention of a sympathetic columnist.
Somewhere at the bottom of the missteps of the last few months is a failure to recognize the depth of the popular ignorance a president of the United States confronts on any issue. This complacency and the tactical errors that have flowed from it might be atoned for by other qualities in a parliamentary leader, whose majority and positions come with the job. But the Democrats have yet to prove that their majority means something solid; and their positions depend on no-one so much as the president. The party, for years, wanted a leader to assure their unity; they thought Obama was the one. Yet he has made it felt in many ways since becoming president that he would be disappointed to identify himself as leader of his party.
His political fortune will now depend on his readiness to reverse that posture. To take control of his presidency, he must give up the ambition to serve as the national moderator, the pronouncer on everything, the man with the largest portfolio. If the public option in health care reform is finally defeated, Obama will not soon recover his credit as a national, a party, or a general-issue leader. To avoid that fate, he will have to grant to politics, mere politics, an importance he has not allowed it thus far.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/character-of-barack-obama_b_251186.html
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