Barack’s Political Blunders Likely to Continue
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Today, Barack Obama is likely to get a rude awakening from the voters of assachusetts, and deservedly so. His own judgement and guidance to date lies at the core of his troubles. His arrogance (I won), refusal to accept criticism while attacking those that disagreed with him (Fox News), his complete disregard for bi-partisanship, his use of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as “de-facto prime ministers,” and his relentless pursuit of an unpopular healthcare bill in a bad economy and in the midst of massive spending and greatly increased deficits, all represent major blunders on his part.
As Jay Cost writes:
If Scott Brown should defeat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election tomorrow, it will be a fitting metaphor for the political trajectory of President Obama’s first year in office. A year ago Democrats were talking about Obama as the next Franklin Roosevelt, and suggesting that they were on the cusp of an enduring majority. Today, they are struggling to hold Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat.Coakley will rightly get most of the blame should Brown actually pull off what once seemed to be an impossible victory. Yet much of the responsibility will have to rest with Barack Obama, who has guided his party so poorly that it is having trouble making an appeal to voters in Massachusetts.
To put it bluntly, the Obama White House has been politically inept in the last year. It has made serious miscalculations, and today it is paying a price.
Ultimately, the reason for these errors goes back to the greenness of the Commander-in-Chief himself, who lacked executive experience and had little first-hand knowledge of the way Washington functions. He put together a team too full of Chicago strongmen, campaign hacks, and sympathetic “Friends of Barack.” Accordingly, he and his executive staff were ill prepared for managing the government. This led to three significant political blunders.
[...] #1. A Lack of Bipartisanship. Nobody (except perhaps Obama’s spinmeisters in the White House) would deny that the President has not been post-partisan. The typical response from the left has been: (a) the Republicans are too crassly political to compromise with; and/or (b) the two parties are now so far apart that there is no middle ground. The problem with this argument is that it fails to account for the near total absence of bipartisanship. Granted that polarization has reduced the number of gettable Republican votes - it surely has not reduced it to zero. Republican legislators like Mike Castle and Susan Collins are fewer in number now than in years past - but such members are still there, and Obama has been hard-pressed to win them over on anything of significance.
[...] #2. Installing Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as de facto prime ministers. A common hobby of political commentators over the last year has been to compare Barack Obama to past presidents. At this point, it’s pretty clear who he isn’t like - and that’s Woodrow Wilson (ironic, considering his background is so similar to Wilson’s). During his first year in office, Wilson took an active role in managing the government. He reinstated the practice of delivering the State of the Union in person. He also was a frequent visitor on Capitol Hill, especially when he fought to keep the Senate from gutting his tariff reform.
Obama, on the other hand, has been content to let Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid handle the difficult task of legislating while he hangs back. His lack of involvement in the process has prompted many cries from Democratic legislators that he engage more fully.
[...] #3 Pursuing an agenda that doesn’t fit the times. I’m talking about health care reform here. For decades, Democratic Presidents have dreamed of comprehensive reform of the nation’s health care system. So, it’s no surprise that President Obama wanted to try his hand at this, especially considering the outsized majorities his party has in Congress. In itself, this was not a mistake.
The mistake comes when we view this pursuit in context. Namely, 2009 was not a good year to focus the government so intently on health care reform. The public wanted a greater focus on the recession, but it didn’t really get one. All it got was a hastily constructed, wasteful stimulus bill that was built on the assumption that unemployment would top out at 8%. As unemployment skyrocketed and the recession dragged on, watching the Senate Finance Committee debate insurance co-operatives and Cadillac taxes made it appear that the government was out of touch.
Additionally, the pursuit of health care reform was difficult to square with a public that has become increasingly deficit conscious. Very few people believe that these reforms will be “deficit neutral,” and for good reason. This is a massive new entitlement program the Democrats are proposing, and our existing entitlements cost way more than initial projections, and more than we can today afford. One need not be a policy wonk to suspect that the Democrats’ math is more than a little “fuzzy.”
Take the time to read it all…
Jennifer Rubin believes that Obama can still recover, and aptly notes that while insularity has been the order of the day this far, we will soon know whether it has cost him his filibuster-proof Senate majority and his signature agenda item. As she points out, three years is indeed a long time in politics, so it’s possible that Obama may yet recover and succeed, but only if he wakes from his political slumber and learns from his many costly misjudgments.
I, on the other hand, believe that Barack is far too arrogant, narcissistic, and overly-absorbed with his far-left, radical, liberal-progressive agenda to change, and will keep on doing what he’s been doing. His political blunders will continue and voters will be turning away in droves. Obama’s standing with American voters has already fallen more dramatically in his first year than any recent president, and it’s far more likely to get worse than it is to get any better.
