Political types used to worry about an imperial presidency in which a chief executive used both formal and merely implied powers of his office to run roughshod over congress, the courts, and other institutions to impose his own will on government policy. No need to worry about that, however, with Barack Obama in the White House.
The man clearly has other priorities. He’s got a lot more important things on his mind than running the country in the way he promised supporters he would run it last election time, or the way most Americans felt he should have tried to run it by exercising real leadership in the debt ceiling crisis.
What, then, has this precious, ethereal being who deigned to become our president been up to of late? What has he and the cerebrally endowed political wonks he surrounds himself with been focused on in recent weeks? The answer, by all accounts, is the intellectually stimulating intricacies of electoral triangulation.
This, after all, is the sort of challenge that superior minds with an ethereal bent really love to tackle. Much more so than immersing themselves in the crass vulgarity of spending cuts or higher taxes. There’s another presidential election in 2012 and Team Obama plans to triangulate itself to victory. That’s what they seem to really care about. And here, according to reports, is how they expect to pull it off.
Conservatives will naturally not back the president. That’s a given, no matter how often he buckles on their issues. Liberals, though, can be taken for granted because the Republican candidate will certainly be less appealing. Liberals have been dissed again and again by the president and his minions, lied to on issues liberals hold dear, betrayed in negotiations that liberals deemed critical, but will nonetheless fall into line come election time. It’s an ethereal certainty.
It’s the independent bloc of voters that Obama White House wonks really expect to pile on big-time for their man in the next election. Their view here is that independents have long craved a president with no discernible fixed principles, who vacillates endlessly when faced with competing views, who shows no leadership at critical moments, and whose rhetoric is so divorced from his actions that he is nearly impossible to take seriously. Ethereally speaking, another certainty.
Such is the thinking of the current occupant of the Oval Office and his helpers. Will it prove correct in 2012?
Personally, I have my doubts. But you never know. If the 2012 race ultimately pits Mr. Obama against a former pizza chain executive, and America-Elect’s own third contender ends up being a “Jersey Shore” TV show favorite, the guy from Chicago might just pull it off.
They can’t seem to govern inside the Beltway anymore. But a Barack-Herman-Snooki face-off in 2012 might at least be entertaining.
More from (and about) this writer at http://cootavengers.com/