Politics Obama - Actually doing a good job?

Do you not know that LBJ got legislation passed that Kennedy could not get passed???? Ever wonder why? How about leadership!

Again, agree or disagree with LBJ's agenda, he should serve as a role model for any President who wants to get big things done. Be dismissive if you want, but this is very constructive insight and Progressives should take note.

 

I think it had been made clear from the beginning that some people on the right were not going to cooperate with the President. It is the President's responsibility to either give those people a reason to cooperate or build a coalition that does not include those people. The President has not done either. I argue that he has not even tried. I don't think he knows how to build a coalition and find common ground with an opposition. It has been echoed here many times, the notion that all Republican are basically the same and are basically bigots who are at war with women, children, elderly, minorities, environmentalist, fairness, equal rights, Santa and the Easter Bunny. Heck Republican are even at war with each other - i.e. Karl Rove types V Sarah Palin types.

Right, people expect a President to make things happen. The "poof" part indicates that they don't care about the details, just get it done. Oh, but it is hard - cry me a river! We elect Presidents and have leaders to do the hard things. If they can't handle it, step aside and let someone who can, do the job.

 

Expectation - government continued operation, meaning no shut down due to the debt ceiling. Is this an unrealistic expectation?
Expectation - unemployment between 3% - 5%. Is this an unrealistic expectation?

Obstruction is a strategy for those needing to leverage a limited amount of power. It is a common strategy - for example unions will use obstruction through strikes in order to leverage their negotiation power. There are responses to this strategy. One is to simply demonstrate a willingness to negotiate or have talks in good faith. If your argument is that President Obama is not capable of handling obstruction, why should he be President? Please explain this to me! Political conflict, obstruction, these things are not new. Leaders deal with these issues and strategies all the time. Is your point that the President is a unique victim of circumstance?

Republicans do not trust the President's rhetoric. He should address this lack of trust. One possibility is to have his party in the Senate write and propose actual legislation if he is willing to lower corporate tax rates in exchange for new stimulus spending. What is the point of a vague speech?

I will support grid-lock until I have a reason not to. I think doing nothing is better than excessive wasteful spending. So, I say that and the response is what? How about making a case that the spending is not going to be excessive and wasteful! what we actually get is demagoguery. If I don't support wasteful spending I want grandma to die, I don't support education, etc.

 

LBJ is just one example. And not even the best one, because as President he had a congress heavily of his own party. But lots of presidents managed to deal effectively with a congress where one or more houses was controlled by the opposition, starting with Truman and moving forward through every single president other than Carter and Kennedy-Johnson. Obama seems to be uniquely unable to deal effectively with people he disagrees with. We can speculate about why, but he really doesn't appear to be good at understanding good faith disagreement, much less crediting that it's in good faith. Boehner doesn't trust him, and he has contempt for Boehner. So if there's no trust and no respect there isn't much basis for moving forward on much of anything. I'd be interested to see how Obama reacts to whatever Max Baucus and Dave Camp come up with on the tax side.

 

Congressional historians Thomas Mann (on the right) and Norm Orstein (on the left) sum it up for me in this Wash Post op ed last year:

You can dismiss the unprecedented abuse of the filibuster/cloture or the unprecedented use of the House rule that discourages compromise with the Democrats as somehow being Obama's fault.

I would suggest that the majority of Americans dont share that belief given the lowest "effectiveness" rating of Congress, and particularly the Republicans, since polling began.

 

obama is a centrist. this is centrism in action when the right has embarked on a scorched earth approach to national-level politics.

you'd almost think the leadership had read carl schmitt (a german constitutional theorist)-->create paralysis in the context of ongoing socio-economic crises in order to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of this "democratic" thing in order to delegitimate conventional institutions and make way for a "Decider"---you know, that single figure of Leadership Embodied who is not encumbered by those pesky laws and/or regulations because of the whole state of emergency thing that Leadership Embodied comes along with. Leadership Embodied in that fabulous mussolini mold, say---you know the cliche---"he made the trains run on time"---now THAT is "leadership" in the grand style of fatuous management literature.

if the "leadership" school were honest--and it never is---it's followers (and boy, do they like to follow) would be all cheering al-sisi in egypt. another example of Leadership Embodied, unencumbered by that pesky law thing, not hamstrung in the exercise of Leadership by questions that occupy the minds of little people like fairness or justice. the Leader helps the Volk discover their Militarized Destiny. and the Leader likes flags and uniforms.

government should be modeled on how capitalist firms pretend they operate? great fucking idea.

 

The legacy of LBJ with Southern Democrats is (he predicted one generation) the conversion of Southern Democrats to Southern Republicans from the mid 60's til today.

I know the main point with LBJ has gotten lost - but LBJ built a coalition of liberal Republicans and Democrats to move major portions of his social agenda against obstructionist members of his own party and the far right wing of the Republican Party.

 

Holding Obama up to LBJ standards and performance while not holding the 112-113th Congress to the standards and performance of 88th-89 Congress is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.

A Fox News kind of one-sided analysis while ignoring the totality of circumstances.
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Hey, give those guys a break - 6 House Republicans (out of 232 are non-White).

 

over time, i have become less and less a fan of the obama administration for its relation to the national-security parasite state and various foreign policy matters...and for being a centrist far too willing to make deal-making and compromise the central mechanism of governing, and for, by extension, being on the one hand too prone to take republicans seriously while, at the same time, being unable of offering a coherent ideological viewpoint that does not, fundamentally, share key attributes of a bankrupt conservative politics. of the latter points, it seems to me that the second is a more fundamental problem than is the first. but they are of a piece.

that said, i can easily imagine that a centrist wedded to this style of coalition building and compromise at the heart of his (or her) way of operating would have a difficult time with the discovery that parties understood to be in good faith are not, in fact, acting in good faith.

such is the position that obama seems to me to be confronting with the republicans.

that the republicans are operating in bad faith seems to me not in dispute.
ace's recent posts seem to replicate this feature of contemporary conservatism.

 

I have higher standards for those who are at the top. Thought I stated that in a previous post. I also believe I stated why I hold that view. We remember the accomplishments of Presidents not the accomplishments of Congressional bodies. If your take on my posts is a belief that I am disingenuous or dishonest, you have not understood my posts.
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I get it. We are in the "self esteem" era. Let's make everyone feel good. Give little Johnnie a trophy for just being on the team even-though he can't play for shit. Little Johnie graduated 2nd grade with a C-, let's celebrate. President Obama is really trying hard, let's give him a break. I am old school.
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Good faith? They told him they wanted him to fail. They were pretty explicit. And they have acted in a manner very consistent with what they stated. How are they not acting in good faith? It is because some current congress-people ran on the notion to vote against President Obama's political agenda that they got elected in 2010 and 2012 - how is that not good faith? Your point of view seems twisted to me. Is "good faith" doing everything you want done?

The President knew what he faced - how has he responded? Has it worked? what adjustments is he making? Perhaps he actually wants grid-lock. Perhpas he believes grid-lock will lead to a super-majority in 2014 - which will be the only way he gets things on his political agenda accomplished. I find it humorous how progressives defend failure.

 

in the game of democratic politics--even shallow-water versions like we have here in the best of all possible systems in the best of all possible countries in the best of all possible worlds--presupposes an interest in the overall functioning of the system. the republicans do not have such an interest. from a viewpoint informed by anything like the idea that the continued functioning of the system of governance is desirable, the republicans are not operating in good faith. period.

worse: that the republicans would be so incapable of separating party interests (at a point when their brand is shit and everyone knows it) from national interest, so that they would conflate advancing party interests with participation in governing, is pathological. you subscribe, rigidly, to a viewpoint according to which that is ok. you might think about that.

 

Ace, I'll stoop to your level of discourse and use an analogy. I know you particularly like marriage analogies.

Think of the president and Congress like a marriage. But in this dysfunctional marriage, you place all the blame on the husband while ignoring the actions of the wife, who cut the honeymoon off before it started, refused to consummate the marriage, insists that the marriage could only proceed on her terms, refuses to accept any responsibility for the failing marriage but promises the hubby may get lucky one day if he bends to all of her unreasonable demands.

 

A function of our system is to balance power. It is an explicit purpose and design within our Constitution. Our system gives voice to minority points of view, we are not a true democracy.

Redistribution of wealth is not a constitutional role of our Federal government. As a primary focus of the progressive political agenda, Republican have a very compelling case for obstruction - in my opinion. Many share my opinion, if the President is a centrist as you believe, has he made his case, has he used the power of his office to change the views of those who believe his progressive agenda is outside of the role of the federal government. He has not.

Voting no, obstructing is part of our functioning republic. For example when Bush made his case for using military force in Iraq, would it have been functional from your point of view for a few people to stand firm and obstruct?

Your point of view is very confusing to me - because on one hand you seem to hold the view that obstructing for what you support is wrong, but obstructing for what you would oppose would be o.k.
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You use the word "blame", to me "blame" is not important. If in a dysfunctional marriage somebody has to take the initiative to fix it or end it. Letting the problem fester is the worst thing to do - in my opinion.

 

Voting no is hardly the same as obstructing.

And the foundation of our republican is compromise not obstructionism, starting with the Great (Connecticut) Compromise of 1787 and the writing of the Constitution. At no time did the framers envision the requirement of a cloture vote to the extent that the Republicans have utilized it in the last four years... more frequently than every Congress between 1917 through the 1970s combined.

U.S. Senate: Reference Home >

It takes both sides willing to compromise, not one side making unreasonable demands and withholding sex until those demands are met.

 

ace, dear, like most reactionary strict constructionists, your position about the constitution runs counter to the entire existing legal system. given that, like most reactionary strict constructionists, the claim is pulled out of your ass to legitimate an aesthetic dislike for taxation--and the entire modern state (usually except for the military) and functions as a rhetorical cover, along with equally meaningless conservative memes like "judicial activism," that transposes "something i don't like" into a matter of pseudo-principle. it is some backwater rhetoric for political opportunism, nothing more. and that's the premise of your argument, such as it is. from there it follows that the "principles" that you imagine animates what the republicans have been doing are arbitrary. and so we're back at the simple reality: the conservative brand is shit; the right cannot separate its partisan interests from the general interests; they're acting in some desperate hope that tanking the system will tank the obama administration and enable them to rescue their shit brand by pinning the blame for their actions on the administration. you'd have to be pretty fucking stupid to buy it.