Nate Silver has a stellar piece in the NYT that crystallizes why liberals are so upset with President Obama's management style. Silver explains that the issue isn't that Obama didn't get everything in health care reform, for example, that he promised us, but rather whether Obama exhausted all the resources he had for getting all he could. Below, I quote a bit of Nate, then write much more about this on AMERICAblog Gay.
But one point about Nate's piece that needs to be mentioned. In it, he notes that ThinkProgress blogger Matthew Yglesias criticized Nate for not acknowledging that NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, unlike Obama, doesn't have to deal with a 60-vote filibuster in the NY Senate. In the NY Senate, all you need is a simple majority to pass legislation, no filibuster needed. So Yglesias' point is that it's unfair to talk about all Cuomo did for getting gay marriage passed in the state, and at the same time knock Obama for not endorsing marriage equality at the federal law.
Wrong.
In the NY state Senate they have a super filibuster. It's called the Republican Majority Leader. He has absolute discretion about what legislation he wants to bring up for a vote. If he didn't want to bring up the same-sex marriage bill, he didn't have to - regardless of how many votes we had. But he did permit the legislation to come up because of the masterful job Cuomo, and the groups, did in lobbying the Republicans - even though the GOP caucus was 28-4 against the bill's passage.
So, in fact, Cuomo's obstacle was even bigger than Obama's - and bigger than any politician in the country apparently. But he won anyway, with no excuses. Sometimes politics is simply about showing up.
More from Nate's piece:
The question, rather, is why Mr. Obama didn’t have the votes for something like the DREAM Act. Or more to the point: are there alternate strategies that Mr. Obama might have pursued under which he would have had the votes? (Even the filibuster, although it has become a significant part of the Senate’s culture, isn’t written into the Constitution: there are options to overcome it. They may be neither feasible nor wise options, but there are options.) [emphasis added.]Hallelujah. Someone finally gets it.
The point is not that this is the right strategy or the wrong strategy. It might well have been the right strategy — I don’t come to a conclusion about that. But I do think it’s fair to characterize it as a risk-averse strategy. And that, at the core, is what bothers some liberals about Mr. Obama’s approach to the presidency. Fairly or not, they want him to push the envelope more than he has and to take a few more chances — to expand the realm of the possible, as Mr. Cuomo seems to have done in New York.In a nutshell, we're looking for change and someone willing to be a vehicle for it. Is that really asking so much?
