Our political Quote of the Day comes from Democratic activist Joe Trippi on CNN’s State of the Union with John King:
“They’re going to keep gunning,” Democratic strategist Joe Trippi said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, referring to conservatives’ recent — and ultimately successful efforts — to target Obama’s green jobs adviser Van Jones over controversial comments he made before becoming a part of Obama’s White House team.
“This administration has the potential to be FDR or Jimmy Carter and I think the Republicans are going to do everything they can to make him Jimmy Carter, to create a failed presidency. That’s, unfortunately, what many of them want.”
Trippi, who served as the campaign manager for Gov. Howard Dean’s bid for the White House, also said he believed that Obama was genuinely interested in bipartisanship but that Republicans are not likely to respond to Obama’s efforts to reach across the aisle.
Obama has to “realize he’s sticking his hand out but many Republicans are just not ready to embrace it,” Trippi told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King.
That’s the question: at one point does Obama need to seriously reassess and see if given the way America’s political culture now operates — with a large chunk of it operating in the talk radio political culture — he has to change his approach for one that might have suceeded a few years or a decade ago, but one that needs to be more anticipatory. Just as smart foreign policymakers in countries prepare multiple scenarios so they’re ready to respond to assumptions, Obama needs to as well. Are his assumptions flawed? If so, he needs to fine-tune his strategy and his tactics.
Whether can do that or not will determine whether he has a successful presidency and whether the impressions that many pundits and politicos had about the skill of his political operation was mistaken. Right now it seems to be a crew that can’t anticipate, stubs its toe and is on the defensive. Not good in the longrun..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.