Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Leadership
The most brilliant professor I ever had the pleasure of studying with is getting a more than a little annoyed:
Obama, like so many Democrats in Congress, has fallen prey to the conventional Democratic strategic wisdom: that the way to win the center is to tack to the center.The essay goes into a little more detail about the specific shortcomings of our current president's style and hits the nail pretty squarely on the head. If you are a political junkie, it's worth five minutes of your time. ¶ 6:20 PM
But it doesn't work that way.
You want to win the center? Emanate strength. Emanate conviction. Lead like you know where you're going (and hopefully know what you're talking about).
People in the center will follow if you speak to their values, address their ambivalence (because by definition, on a wide range of issues, they're torn between the right and left), and act on what you believe. FDR did it. LBJ did it. Reagan did it. Even George W. Bush did it, although I wish he hadn't.
But you have to believe something.
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I'm a centrist and I'm not disappointed.
He's a smart guy doing the best he can in a tough job. Ship's headed in the right direction and frankly that was all I expected out of the guy.
The Congress and the media have as much to blame for the current state of inaction as the President himself does. They only give the guy so much power, ya know.
This is a great post for the people over at the HuffPo and he makes a great point about disillusionment, but this is a call for Obama to ram his agenda down America's throat, and realistically that's not what the country as a whole wants. So it looks like this--baby steps and half-loaves.
We're lurching along in the right direction. My torch and my pitchfork are probably safely away in the barn for the winter.
He's a smart guy doing the best he can in a tough job. Ship's headed in the right direction and frankly that was all I expected out of the guy.
The Congress and the media have as much to blame for the current state of inaction as the President himself does. They only give the guy so much power, ya know.
This is a great post for the people over at the HuffPo and he makes a great point about disillusionment, but this is a call for Obama to ram his agenda down America's throat, and realistically that's not what the country as a whole wants. So it looks like this--baby steps and half-loaves.
We're lurching along in the right direction. My torch and my pitchfork are probably safely away in the barn for the winter.
This sums it up for me, but not because of the president - the for sale sign on the back of every congressmen does it for me.
"Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry)."
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"Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry)."
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