27 comments:

I'm still not sure if he actually is too attached to negotiating beyond the point of hope with Republicans. But it sure has hell seemed like it the first term. This isn't the Republican party he dealt with when he was in the Senate, even. I hope that realization comes or has already come.

I'm not sure how much he may have believed this initially, but by now he should have figured out that simply calling on Republicans to be bipartisan is unlikely to convince them. Doesn't mean it's not a worthy end, just that's it's a terrible means.

I hope Obama has learned not to underestimate the ignorance of the American people. Regardless of how easy he thinks it is to understand a proposed policy, he needs to communicate with the public as though he were explaining the policy to his daughters when they were kindergartners.

I really hope he's begun to understand that you don't achieve bipartisanship by proposing bipartisan policies, you achieve it by holding firm and forcing the other side to knuckle under. Also, the American people are COOL WITH THE FACT THAT YOU'RE BLACK, so quite worrying about that.

I'm going to take what seems to be an unpopular position here. I think that Obama's posture of negotiating with the Republcans *as if* they were reasonable was good politics--not because it helped him with confirmed Republicans (it didn't) but because it helped convince moderate voters that Obama was reasonable and the GOP was crazy. This no doubt helped Obama to get re-elected and the Democrats to make gains in both the Senate and House last year. And virtually every agreement he eventually reached with the GOP was much less a sell-out than some progressives first labeled it. (Even Krugman admitted that the fiscal cliff deal was not that bad on the merits; he was only worried that it foreshadowed a future cave by Obama on the debt ceiling--and as Krugman has admitted, he was wrong about that.)

I hope he learned that Republicans will never agree with his agenda and must either find a way to negotiate in a way that does not compromise his goals or stick to his guns and hope he keeps backing them against the wall. Also, like Moneyball said, he needs to explain his policies to the public in a way that is broken down and understandable. I think one of the reasons why people got so confident in Obama was because of Clinton's DNC speech. He managed to dismantle the Republican platform just by translating their rhetoric into English. Obama needs to follow that lead in order to have people by his side.

I hope Obama will look for ways to enact his agenda outside of just trying to get bills through Congress. Passing laws and budgets is important, but so is appointing judges and staffing the government, he shouldn't do one to the detriment of the other.

I'm sure Obama has learned the ropes of the presidency, but - unlike everyone above except perhaps David T - I can't think of any Big Lessons he should have learned.

In his first two years, with a Dem congress, he racked up huge accomplishments. In the last two years, facing a very tough headwind, he set the stage to win re-election and then thump the GOP.

In particular he was playing a terrible hand in 2011 - the GOP had won big in the midterms, and the economy was still effectively in the crapper. But the original debt limit deal turned out to be to his strategic advantage, as we are now seeing.

Maybe it isn't 11-dimensional chess, but he has certainly played a few moves ahead of the Republicans.

1. Pay a lot of attention to executive branch and judicial nominations - select nominees and then push the Senate to confirm them.2. Recognize when you have leverage and use it. You can't count on the Republican Party to act in the country's interest.3. Use the bully pulpit. It might or might not influence Republican votes in Congress, but it can help make the public more aware of who is gumming up the works on popular initiatives.

BTW, I am fairly confident he has learned lessons 2 and 3. Not sure about 1.

The truth is the GOP doesn't support the conservative base. It supports the industrial/military complex. Until the vast majority of American's wake up to the fact that both parties have only one agenda and that is reelection then the only view our politicians will have is that of those can finance thier campaigns. Without term limits this country is headed for disaster.

Government can and does create jobs. Your stimulus worked and all the predictions that Republicans and other deficit peacocks made about soaring interest rates, hyperinflation, etc. were wrong. So stop with the austerity already.