I just watched President Obama on the Daily Show. Not a bad half hour. Not exactly riveting, a bit boring at times, but interesting nevertheless.
A few preliminary observations. I thought Jon Stewart did a very good job in asking some tough questions and not letting the President off the hook too easily. This is no mean feat. Obama is the President of the United States after all, and the audience was clearly with him - no shoe throwers out there. Stewart, without being rude, was able to get across his disappointment with the President's performance to date. This put the President on the defensive and I doubt that his responses, frequently a bit long winded, changed any minds out there about this common concern. Stewart joked quite a bit about the overblown campaign rhetoric - "we are the ones we have been waiting for" type of thing. He made his point quite effectively. Part of Obama's problem now is the incredibly unrealistic expectations which the Obama campaign itself created about his transformative Presidency.
Stewart let a couple of obvious points go. President Obama blamed a lot of his troubles on the so-called 60 vote "requirement" to get things through in the Senate. Stewart could have noted that Obama had his 60 votes until Scott Brown's victory in January 2010. The trouble with getting his agenda through was at least up until then, with his own party, not with the Republicans. As well the refrain often heard from the Obama administration is that these have been the two toughest years since the Great Depression. This historical narrative skips over World War II, the Vietnam war, and a few other weighty problems which Presidents have faced. But I do not fault Stewart. He was not there to debate the President, and I think he did a good job in "keeping the President honest" while still giving the President his chance to speak.
As for the President, I also give him credit. He was a good sport to go on the show, and as usual exhibited his intelligence. Although defensive, he got his points across.
Good television; but certainly not a game changer for next week.
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As usual, he wasn't held accountable for the judicial vacancy crisis, his continuation of Bush national security policies, the failure of the finance bill to deal with moral hazard, what exactly Elizabeth Warren's job is, why the CFPA isn't allowed to deal with car loans, why the health care bill doesn't address costs, &c &c. Seems Americans only care about the economy & calling the return to 2001 tax policy 'the President's plan to make the US the twenty-first arrondissement'
ReplyDeleteAs for the stuff about 60 vote supermajority requirements, I'd only note that in the past, the press called a spade a spade: these are filibusters. If the GOP filibusters a bill on pay for veterans (to give a recent example) a headline reading, "Democrats Fail to Pass Defense Bill" is a plain lie, no matter how you slice it.
-scott
Scott,
ReplyDeleteYou may not remember the days of Ronald Reagan, who as President never once had a majority of supporters in the House. (The Senate had a GOP majority for 6 out of his 8 years, but never once did they crack 60 as the Dem's had briefly under President Obama.)
So, how did Reagan get stuff done? He cut deals. He even - on many occasions - came to the Capitol Building and met members of the House and the Senate on their own turf. Dems like Tip O'Neill and Teddy Kennedy went into those meetings swearing they would never support the President on whatever the issue was (usually a budget proposal) but came out having done just that. (An American friend of mine used to joke that Reagan was blackmailing them with party photos. And, in the case of Kennedy, this was always a possibility.) In other words, the President engaged with his opponents, instead of skirting them.
Now, granted, it's not like the GOP is in a mood to play nice with Obama, even if he decides to seek face-to-face encounters. But, as someone who came of age politically during the early 80s, I think I can justly claim that hyper-partisanship among US politicians was no less prevalent during the Reagan Administration than it is now (although it was definitely less prevalent among the general US population than it is now.) (If you don't believe me, read up on what happened to President Reagan's SCOTUS nominee in the Summer of 1987). The only difference was that it was just going in the opposite direction: the fury (and I mean FURY) was being directed by Democrats at Republicans for dismantling the apparatus of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Just Society that people like O'Neill and Kennedy had helped construct and perpetuate.
I see your point about filibusters. But I also think there is a valid point being made when detractors see Democrats as "failing" to move their agenda forward. And one of the reasons they are failing to do so, I believe, is President Obama's inability or unwillingness to meet and persuade his opponents, and to be seen as wanting to do so. Doing so would be an act consistent with that ephemeral quality that politicians ambiguously refer to as "leadership".
This isn't to say that most of the attacks that are levelled at President Obama - including those contained in some of Lewis's posts - are anywhere close to being fair. President Obama, to take just one example, is hardly the first politician in modern history to ride in on a wave of voters' high hopes, only to end up having to make compromises or pragmatic retreats which disappoint the people who put them into office. Ronald Reagan was another. So was Bill Clinton. So was Lyndon Johnson (after his election in '64, I mean. It hardly seems accurate to describe him as having ridden in on a wave in November '63). So, by the way, for some people at least, was George W. Bush. But, even if we put aside the unfair attacks, I think it remains fair to say that Obama's failure to overcome filibusters does suggest a certain ineptness on his part as a political leader. Those examples that you give (judicial vacancies, continued misguided national security policies, etc.) are instances of this failure of leadership, BUT so is his failure to overcome filibusters.