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"What's costing the president are three things: a laissez
faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday
Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological
position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares
more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health
and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are
shafting." Drew Westen, Leadership Obama Style
I think it is more that last of the three than anything else,
and explains the others. Obama is captive to special interests, as are many
of the key members of the Congress, and the Obama Administration, and the
Federal Reserve. And I should add his two predecessors.
It explains why he cannot articulate a coherent ideological position and make
it stick. Make no mistake, he is a smart and verbally adept individual, a
gifted person intellectually. But he cannot adhere to principles because he
has abandoned whatever principles he may have had to serve a variety of
corrupting interests. And he appears laissez faire and distant because he is
a figurehead, a household servant, and not in control.
What makes Obama a greater failure than either Bush or Clinton is that he was
elected on the promise of reform, a promised change, a political renewal in a
country sickened by the erosion if not betrayal of its republic by men who
view the Constitution as 'just a goddam piece of paper.'
"Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new
and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008
into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of
young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the
winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big
oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership
style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its
sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every
day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the
political spectrum.
What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't
a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the
remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off
voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be
the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing
both."
*
The American people and what passes for their thought leaders in
a captive media and a craven academy are a significant part of the problem.
Rather than engaging in serious critical thought, most political reactions
are cartoon-like, an emotional and visceral red vs. blue mentality that is so
painfully evident in their Sunday morning television programs, that is more
appropriate to the elementary school playing fields than serious political
discussion or the work of running a country. What is held out as the
alternative to Obama by the opposition? A brainless Bimbette, or some other
servile hack of the machine, who in turn will serve the special interests of
the corporations all too well, but will give a different portion of the
voting public a sense of 'victory' as their slavery is made complete.
"The
government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have no
special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for
getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search
out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to
give it to them. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every
election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
H. L. Mencken
Mencken is of course directionally correct, but I am not so
cynical as he was. The American people had done better in conducting an
idealistic revolution and the founding of a republic, and tempered it with
the blood of patriots. And so it was the light of the world. And they can do
better than this again.
Jesse
Please visit Jesse’s Café Américain
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