“But don’t blame Rahm Emanuel; this is about the president. 
After Massachusetts, Democrats were looking for leadership; they didn’t get it. Ten days later, nobody is sure what Obama intends to do, and his aides are giving conflicting readings. It’s as if Obama checked out.
“Look, Obama is a terrific speaker and a very smart guy. He really showed up the Republicans in the now-famous give-and-take. But we knew that. What’s now in question isn’t his ability to talk, it’s his ability to lead.”
in a New York Times blog post, Cossack Rahm Works For The Czar,
Jan. 30, 2010
It’s beginning to look as though our president sees the federal government as a giant roundtable and his role as being that of moderator. Just hold a few good, civilized discussions and legislators will return to their chambers and do the right thing.
If Franklin Roosevelt had adopted that approach in combating the Great Depression, the New Deal would have been the No Deal, and a desperate, dissatisfied public might well have thrown their support behind a communist or fascist vowing to knock heads and jail reactionaries to turn things around.
If that seems far fetched, consider what happened in Germany, Italy, Jugoslavia, Romania and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s.
Civilized discussions are important. Proactive, determined, unrelenting leadership is required.
You’ll have to educate me here S.W., I’m under the impression that Congressional politicians are the lawmakers and, although the President pushes his agenda on them, as much as he can, he either does, or doesn’t sign the bills that emerge. Should he start issuing Executive Orders and bypass Congress altogether? Bush got pretty much everything he wanted because Congress gave it to him. This current congress, including some Democrats, are a little less giving.
Your analogy with FDR is apt. I’ve never Googled this, but a lot of people have said that if FDR (or someone like him) hadn’t gotten elected and started fixing things quickly, there really would have been a violent populist revolution here.
A variation on that theory is: if that revolution had been attempted, rightwing/Big Business forces would have won, and we would have been a rightwing dictatorship ever since then.
In any case, it’s time for Obama to stop being this genial detached facilitator and start being as firm as he needs to be.
Holte, Obama should start by making clear to legislators on both sides, and the public, what he expects to see included in any health care reform bill. He then needs to take that list of must haves to the people and get them fired up, putting pressure from back home on legislators. He needs to get collateral help building public pressure from Bill Clinton, from his Cabinet members, even from past legislators and candidates such as Tom Foley, Tom Daschle, Max Cleland, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis and more. Obama needs to hammer on health care reform day in, day out, with no letup — much the way Bush did when trying to sell his Iraq invasion. And that’s just for starters. There are more-direct ways Obama can motivate senators and reps to do the right thing, including blue dogs and fifth columnists.
For another indication of how Obama might better approach this, read Frank Rich’s excellent Sunday column, The State of the Union Is Comatose, especially where he talks about Lyndon Johnson. In fact, if you don’t read another thing this week, please read that one; it’s superb.
Tom, my junior high and high school history and social studies teachers lived through the Depression. They said a whole lot of people flirted with communism, with some paying a price later on when McCarthyism was running its course. Others got involved in things like the American Nazi Bund movement. The danger was real and more widespread than most people today seem to realize.
Politically, if people understand the health care reform bill Obama and congressional Democrats have come up with, are confident it’s not a “the fix is in” deal for health insurers and others, and see their president and legislators fighting tooth and nail for it, they’ll accept with much more grace a failure to get it for now, than if they see them just sort of giving up because it’s just too much trouble.
I read Rich’s column, it is excellent, but it would be a big ask to turn Obama into LBJ who had years of arm twisting practice. Perhaps Obama needs a few enforcers in both houses, and really they should be lining up asking for the job. They’re all too worried about losing their seats and that nice $174,000 salary and not forgetting that Cadillac health coverage.
Time for me to go to the caribbean and retire…at least I know that I can give some bribes and get things done, get what I pay for…right now I really don’t know which way is up in America. If you have to beg and bully folks to do the right thing for their own future then I think we are fighting a losing battle from the beginning. Universal Healthcare is supposed to be a good thing, yet folks on both sides of the aisle don’t seem to get it. Is the word Socialism really such a scary word that people are afraid to support the President? I think only the president is playing with a full deck.
I see this country as being much closer to the 1980s-era USSR than the fascist dictatorships of the 1930s. The one big difference in us and most of those other places you mentioned is that we have a huge minority population, and they are heavily concentrated in certain locales. This resembles the USSR more than it does Germany or Italy. In addition, we have a huge mass of people who simply do not participate in day-to-day society. This is also more Soviet than anything else. We’re also in a hugely unpopular and costly war that forces us to borrow enormous amounts from foreign sources. Again, more Soviet than German.
And last but not least, we have an intellectual at the center of Government who doesn’t seem to understand the force of the coming cauldron, nor do any of his advisers, or even the legislators. Think Gorbachev and the Supreme Soviet.
I think that a fascist dictatorship is likely, but I think it’ll be down in old Dixie. I’m cautiously hopeful that the rest of us can work out something that makes sense.
I think Jolly Roger is calling these people communists. I can’t believe Beck was right! Wolverines!
Holte, looking from the outside it does seem Obama’s not getting the support from within the House and Senate that he should be getting on health care. But there likely is more going on in both than we can see. It doesn’t help when his own advocacy for health care has been muddled and off and on. It has to be clear to all and spelled out emphatically, repeatedly.
teeluck, our system works best when it’s a blend of socialism and free-market capitalism. For example, the Postal Service and UPS. Despite that, the traditional notion about socialism is that it’s un-American.
Most Americans conflate socialism with Soviet communism, with state ownership and control of everything and everyone, and with a police state. It’s a failure of education. Why? Well, given that most Americans have a fuzzy, erroneous notion of what socialism is, about its various forms such as the democratic socialism common across Scandinavia and Europe, any public school teacher who started talking about socialism as anything but a menace to freedom would likely get in trouble and might even be out of a job.
JR, you’re saying southerners better save their Dixie cups, because the south will rise again?
Seriously, you make interesting points about parallels with the latter-stage Soviet Union. I don’t completely agree, but I can see why you would say that.
Randal, whatever else happens, Beck is not right. Take that as a given.