Washington Monthly's Steve Benen:
But as Kevin concluded, “[I]n two years Obama has done more to enact a liberal agenda than George Bush did for the conservative agenda in eight. That’s not bad, folks. All things considered, I’d say Obama is the most effective politician of the Obama era. And the Bush era too.”Sorry, I just can't let this one pass. First off, the biggest complaint about President Obama is that he is the king of missed opportunity. Even were I to concede the good he's done (and I don't concede Benen's hagiography at all), Obama was handed a huge mandate, a public craving leadership after a failed GOP presidency and an economy in tatters, an opposition party in ruin, a whopping approval rating, and control of both houses of Congress (with 59, and then 60 Senators on his side, and a healthy majority in the House).
I’d go just a little further and say Obama is the most effective politician since Reagan, and depending on the day, perhaps even the most effective politician since LBJ.
What did the President do with this historic confluence of power and opportunity handed to him? He immediately began to compromise on day one with first the stimulus and then health care reform.
Rather than go big and push for what was needed and/or what he promised, President Obama let incrementalism be his guide, set his sights low, then sat back and didn't get involved (he calls it "leading from behind") until it was nearly too late. The result? A stimulus that reasonable people knew was too small when it was proposed (the results of which continue to haunt us to this day, and may just lose us the Senate and the White House next year - not just because it was too small, but because the President failed to defend it and now it's a political albatross in addition to not nearly effective enough), and a health care law that nobody can even remember what it did (other than help people with pre-existing conditions). And not to knock the health care law, because I hear it will some day do great things (that was a brilliant move, by the way, making the important parts of the health care law not kick in for years), but it too could have been so much more had the President actually tried. He sat back for months, ceded power to health care reform's enemies in congress, and by the time he got involved, the public option, which was the center piece of his plan for cutting costs and expanding coverage (even though now he pretends it was a minor footnote), was dead. And forget about doing anything about drug prices, God forbid we tick off big pharma by simply asking them why they're charging me $25 in France for the same asthma medicine they charge me $155 for in Washington, DC?
Then there's the President's seeming inability to successfully articulate an effective argument in defense of anything he wants to do or has already done, so that now the public thinks the stimulus didn't create a single job, and they hate "health care reform" even though they actually love the details of it when you don't mention those details are part of "health care reform." And there's no need to revisit the President's negotiating skills, as the deficit deal debacle is still fresh in everyone's minds.
As for George W. Bush, you have to remember that he didn't have a mandate at all. He didn't even win the election, by some accounts. And how many Republicans did Bush have in the Senate? Never more than 55. President Obama, on the other hand, had a max of 60 Democrats and Independents to work with. And what did George Bush do with less opportunity than Barack Obama?
1. The Bush tax cuts, which are a good part of the reason that the budget is broke today, and a good part of the reason that Democrats felt they had to agree to the crappy deficit deal, and why they don't think we can afford another stimulus. Pretty damn effective tax cuts.I do not mean to suggest that President Obama has done no good. He has. But even the great things he's done weren't so great when you dig into the detaeils, like lifting the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military (something that has yet to happen, by the way) was such a botched exercise that but for a raucous gay activist community, it would have likely never happened.
2. Or how about the Patriot Act, that seemed to be a pretty effective far-reaching piece of legislation.
3. Then there's putting Alito and Roberts, and the selection of Roberts as chief justice.
4. Killing the Kyoto Accords.
5. Torture.
7. Suspending habeas corpus.
8. Illegal wiretapping of Americans.
9. Afghanistan. (War, and the defense build-up that follows, is a critical component of the GOP agenda.)
10. Iraq.
11. John Ashcroft.
12. Partial-birth abortion ban.
13. Withdrawal from ABM Treaty
14. Abstinence education
15. Faith-based initiative
16. The War on Terror (and its impact on the American psyche)
Things are bad out there. People are ticked. The left's relationship with this President is seriously strained. And we're about to lose the White House and the Senate, to go along with last year's loss of the House. This President doesn't need further enabling. He needs an intervention.
PS The best president ever just suggested that the Democrats in Congress were partly to blame for the FAA stand-off, and that they were endangering the recovery (something he of course is now endangering with his deficit deal). He trotted out his old blaming things on the "politics of Washington" canard, which manages to blame Democrats and smear a lot of good people who work in this town, while at the same time helping his re-election at the expense of the Democrats holding on to the Senate next year. No, it's not the politics of Washington, Mr. President, it's your friends the Republicans.
Another PS - Adam Serwer wrote an interesting response to this as well over at the American Prospect. Possible more scathing than mine.
