Leadership = creativity + guts

Obama has barely enough guts to defend an idea with either a sizable constituency on the left, like major health care reform, or on the right, like escalation of the Afghanistan war. (Both of which, in my view, being bad moves). The truth is that neither the left nor the right have been creative enough to come up with credible solutions to our current crises and both major parties are mired in the status quo when it comes to anything offensive to elite corporatist interests. The leader we need is one whose analytical skills are not applied to finding excuses for failure but for finding ways to deal with the nation's problems which, although doubtlessly opposed by entrenched interests and ideologues on one side or other, are justified and justifiable to the general public. I believe such ideas exist but they need to be dragged out into the open from underneath the nay-saying scorn of self interested and dogmatic opposition.

Obama on the economy

"I thought the economy would have gotten better by now," he said.

Probably because he really didn't want to hear about serious structural problems. He wanted to treat the Great Recession as merely a worse than unusual cyclical downturn -- enough fiscal and monetary stimulus, a few emergency bailouts and it would soon be all over. It isn't true. Like an outgoing tide, this recession revealed, to those willing to see it, the wreckage previously obscured from view -- the decline of manufacturing and the financialization of the economy, the stagnation of real wages and the historically extreme wealth distribution skew, the capture of the regulators, and Congress, by the corporatist elites. This was more than the new President was willing to grapple with given his preference for health system reform.

After apologizing to the corporatists for his few mild rhetorical "antibusiness" indiscretions and groveling before them, he hopes to receive soothing approvals -- the consolation for his failures being told by the many anti-reform interests that there really wasn't any more he could have done nor do now.

The "Tea Party" doesn't like Obama

... and I don't much care for him either. I think he is the "change" candidate who has been positively afraid to recognize how much difficult reform is actually needed. We have very expensive quagmire wars being fought for shifting and questionable reasons, a collapsed and corrupt financial system, a hollowed out industrial base, a sagging infrastructure, an exploding government debt and a Federal bureaucracy that demonstrates incompetence in dealing with hurricanes, oil spills, credit bubbles, faked foreign intelligence, illegal immigrants, illegal drugs and with battleworn troops being poorly treated by the Veterans Administration -- just to name just a few examples. Neither have we closed the Guantanamo prison nor prosecuted our war criminals as our treaty commitments legally require us to.

Ironically, however, the condemnation from the right is largely ignorant or knowingly malicious "big lie" style propaganda that falsely accuses this President, who has gone endlessly astray with futile attempts to placate the right, of being a radical leftist. He is actually, like most Republicans, a big government authoritarian pragmatist-opportunist subservient to militarist and corporatist interests who, in terms of political muscle rather than size, define the actual current political center in this country.

Not just perceptions -- Obama's problem is truly poor leadership

If you believe Richard Cohen at the WaPo today, Obama suffers from Jimmy Carter's problem of perception:

Carter's energy program was right on the money. The message was fine; the messenger was awful. This is exactly the case with Obama, who is far more likable than Carter, yet is being cuffed around in a similar manner. Being right is nice. Convincing others you are is essential.

Obama's real problem is that he stops at being, at most, half right. After a rhetorical gesture in the right direction where reform, ("change we can believe in"), is needed he proceeds to muddle and mix the message with concessions to opponents who are mainly beneficiaries of the status quo. We get, therefore, bailouts but no real restructuring of a disfunctional banking system. He demands an AfPak exit strategy but agrees to a "surge" designed by his General in charge who says: "This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives." Even his signature health care reform was basically abandoned by him leaving it to his Party in Congress to figure out, in negotiations with lobbyists, what exactly was to be done -- so even if somehow something was done right in the process it will not have been Obama's doing.

If anything, Obama's rhetoric has been over bold compared to what he has actually been prepared to fight for. To go by his rhetoric, it can be possible to view Obama as a "socialist" or a "Kenyan anticolonialist" or even a "community organizer", but when it comes to his actual accomplishments he is just another patsy for the corporatist and militarist elites.

You call this "Push Back"?

What is hard to understand are the reviews of Woodward's book, "Obama's Wars", speaking approvingly of how Obama "pushed back" on the Generals and civilian militarists advising him -- this based on concessions he won on paper which are totally unenforceable. Instead of giving the war makers everything they want immediately he'll just have to give them 80 percent down with the rest due when they report that "good progress has been made but we need to do more or all that we have accomplished so far will be wasted and Al Qaeda will be triumphant and a worse threat than ever". Who, except for the President, doesn't see that coming? Obama did not "push back" in any meaningful way. He only kicked and scratched a bit as the Generals pinned him to the floor.

Torture, assasination and who knows what else?

Rights groups sue over U.S. authority to use terror kill list

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging the U.S. government's authority to target and kill U.S. citizens outside of war zones when they are suspected of involvement in terrorism.

Obama reaped a harvest of praise when he ordered an end to torture, ("enhanced interrogation"), but he left loopholes: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12041
Neither has he done anything at all to inhibit the un-banning of the full torture regime by a successor Administration -- or even his own. The ban has the earmarks of mere expedient political posturing as opposed to an act of either moral principle or fidelity to the rule of law. It therefore comes as no surprise to this observer that the President, like many a shabby third world despot, is also comfortable with the deployment of death squads.

About that withdrawal date.

I am about as certain as I can be that Karzai, the Taliban, the Pakistan military and just about everyone else in the region expected all along that the insurgency would outlast the occupation. If Obama had insisted, Bush-Cheney style, that we would stay as long it takes everyone over there would have dismissed it as chest-thumping bluster. Only our domestic warhawks could possibly talk themselves into actually believing such a thing. No US President could deliver on such a promise. His time in office is limited as is the patience of the American public. Under the circumstances, Obama was wise to use a target date, (not actually a promise), for withdrawal as a spur for Afghan reform, It probably won't work, but there is little else to even try.

Who are the DOJ lawyers really protecting

By his forbearance to seek prosecutions as well as his continuation of many Bush-Cheney polices and claims to "unitary executive" style authority President Obama has made himself complicit in the subversion of international treaty law and the Constitution. The main legal protection that Bush-Cheney officials, and now President Obama, have are the distorted DOJ analyses that what was done or condoned was not technically illegal. This defense relies strongly on the notion that the DOJ opinions were not deliberately contrived in conspiracy with officials who otherwise might face war crime charges. Protecting Yoo and Bybee by asserting their good intentions is a necessary part of a broad defense strategy that apparent violations of humanitarian law were only innocent mistakes of judgment. Make no mistake, the main object is to protect not the CIA interrogators but the Presidents who are ultimately responsible. If it were just the CIA interrogators they might well be thrown to the wolves much as some of the military ones were. DOJ lawyers in both cases are not really judging government employees who are without influence in the DOJ. They are being asked, indirectly, to indict Presidents. An independent Judiciary, if we have such, might produce a more honest result but I am not hopeful that it would or could take jurisdiction.

Why the Democrat's "health reform" is in trouble

Why is the Democrat's "health reform" in trouble? The short answer is lack of effective leadership from the White House.

To elaborate: Obama's decision to campaign for health care reform, like that to endorse the Afghanistan war as the "good" war, was made for tactical political reasons rather than objective cost-benefit analysis. I doubt he ever really bothered to understand what kind of reform was needed. He just assumed that Democrats in Congress would come up with something for him that would placate his progressive base even as he otherwise offended it over his continuation of Bush-Cheney policies with regard to widening warfare and evasions of the rule of law. He has failed to understand that tactical political maneuvers, however expertly executed on his behalf by experienced pols, would not produce a result of visable net benefit to the public unless guided by a well informed strategic purpose.

Obama is just a charismatic campaigner who erroneously assumed that policy "wonkery" could be safely left to others.

Spineless Obama

I suspect that Obama's lack of spine is related to the well known lack of spine of Congressional Democrats in the GWB years. It is significant that Obama's famous sharp and prescient criticism of the Iraq war occurred before he was elected to the US Senate. Once there, the Democratic leadership instructed him in cowering and cringing before right-wing opponents with special emphasis on retreat and surrender. He has yet to recover from those lessons.

Obama can be the new LBJ

Whipping up adequate support for a full scale anti-insurgency war in Afghanistan, as proposed by General McChrystal, requires the skills of a demagogue. He must be willing to lie about the prospects of success and to demonize the enemy beyond even its real sins. Anything less and the patience of the public will soon run out.

I think Obama can be pushed far enough by politics and cynicism into committing to the war but not far enough to pull it off as a "wartime president". The most likely result is that like LBJ he will become too unpopular to run for a second term and will be succeeded by a Republican running on a pledge to bring the troops home.