In contrast to some who are arguing that President Barack Obama needs to win over the center and somehow shake some bipartisanship into 21st century America’s political culture, some others argue that bipartisanship has failed, Obama has hurt himself for coming across as a political wimp who’s easy to be rolled and that he has to start to show a more ideologically principled fighting side.
Which brings us to our Quote of the Day, an argument laid out minus typical blogosphere rage-speckled polemics by Nate Silver:
Obama–who, incidentally, is not only a former community organizer fully conversant in the history of social movements and the resistance to them, but a former constitutional law professor and student of presidential politics–needed to recognize from the jump that a supermajority-worthy personal and public campaign had to be waged on behalf of healthcare reform. A few heads should have rolled, a few prisoners taken. Rather than worrying as she was today about disgusting and devious wiretappers, Sen. Mary Landrieu–no Senate titan she–should have spent the past few months worried about the Wrath of Obama. Joe Lieberman, ditto.
Meanwhile, there should have been a rollout explaining that reform was not only good for corporate employers and thus American productivity, but also for worker and workplace performance and, thus again, American productivity. He should framed reform in those terms–rather than as a series of vignettes, true and as sad as they may be, about people with dropped coverage or bankrupting bills–and then publicly dared Republicans and their tea-partying conservative allies to vote against a bill that would make the American economy and the workers who fuel it more effective, more efficient, more productive and more competitive because we would no longer lose time and money and paperwork and missed work days to a cobbled-together health care system constructed more or less around the time The Edsel rolled out.
…… Obama should come out with guns ablazing. Hope, bipartisanship, compromise and listening are great while campaigning as a presidential candidate. But this is governing by the President of the United States and, more specifically, presidential governing within a political system and during a partisan era in which truly progressive reforms will always need to clear more and higher hurdles…as this President–of all presidents–ought to know.
So which advice is the best? Partisans will argue this week; historians will judge based on what happens after this week.
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.