Is President Barack Obama (finally) finding his (real) voice? It sure sounds that way on several fronts. For instance, Martin Longman, aka Booman, notes:
The president is basically free now to let his true colors fly since he has no elections to worry about for the remainder of his presidency. Perhaps that is why he’s taking a strong position on Net Neutrality today, but I wonder why in the hell he didn’t make the announcement before people went to the polls. Personally, I probably should care at least a little bit about this issue, but I really don’t. Plenty of people do, though, and they’re precisely the kind of people who would take one look at how Ted Cruz and John Boehner have responded and found a good reason that was otherwise lacking to go out and vote against the Republicans.
I personally think that when the history books are written, Barack Obama will go down as someone who was almost politically negligent in several ways. I’m reading Doris Kerns Goodwin’s Pulitizer Prize winning book “No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II” and in no way, shape or form can Obama’s political chops be compared to FDR’s when he was in office. Or JFK’s. There’s a sloppiness Obama’s political responses and timing once in office. He and his crew have proven to be masterful campaign pros, but each time they’ve won, it then almost becomes Amateur Hour in the political world.
Obama could have taken some bigger risks and stepped out in several areas during the campaign, even if some Democrats resembled political jellyfishes in not wanting to make waves by endorsing him. He and some these of these nervous Democrats didn’t want to make political waves — and so, in the end, they were flattened by a virtual political tsunami.
But Obama can’t be called “another FDR…another JFK…” or (sorry Republicans) “another Carter.” One day a future President will be called “another Obama” and while that has yet to be totally defined, at this point it will likely mean someone who talks a good game, fights a good fight, and gets some things done, but doesn’t quite have his act together in making smooth political moves with smart and advantageous timing.
And Democrats? They had a nice snooze through the election and when they woke upon election day, they awoke with a start and now realize they were asleep at the switch. A switch now controlled by the GOP.
The operative question now is whether Barack Obama will feel liberated. He doesn’t have to run for election again. He doesn’t have a Democratic controlled Senate expecting him to do certain things as their Democrat in the White House. And unless he’s totally clueless, he knows full well much the Republicans in both Houses will cooperate with him (not much, if not zero). Will he find a decisive voice on a host of issues and be ready to do verbal and legislative battle with those clearly primed to constrain, politically disembowel or defeat him?
The motif for historians, I predict, will be of blown political opportunities due to bungling, flawed assumptions and near political negligence.
Of course, he could prove me wrong the next two years.
After all: he proved me wrong in the way I judged his political chops after he won the 2008 campaign.
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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.