How Obama Can Reboot His Presidency
George W. Bush never admitted a mistake. It’s time for his successor to save a crumbling presidency by admitting his own while going head-to-head with Tea Party treason that is subverting his and America’s future.
“These guys are playing a different game than the president’s playing,” Vice President Biden tells Democrats about the intransigence of Congressional Republicans. “And we are no longer playing.”
Good enough, but Barack Obama has to do more than that—-start a new game (perhaps with a 60 Minutes mea culpa) by flatly admitting his misjudgments, telling voters what he has learned from them and enlisting their support against the know-nothing, do-nothing opposition he now faces.
Even the miserable opinion polls show rays of hope with substantial percentages of Republicans and Independents approving the President’s plan to raise taxes on corporations and the superrich even while disapproving his handling of the economy. It’s time for him to “reboot his presidency,” says one pollster.
Ron Suskind’s new book portrays “a young, inexperienced president lacking the leadership and managerial skills to deal effectively with the cascading economic problems he inherited; a brainy but detached executive with a tendency to frame policy matters intellectually…an oddly passive C.E.O.”
As tendentious as these anonymous assertions may be, it would be healthy for the body politic to hear the President’s own version of what happened and what he learned from it.
