Yesterday, the NYT ran a review of Chuck Todds' new book about Obama, entitled "The Stranger."
The book -- described as a "stinging indictment" of Obama's presidency - removes any lingering doubt (if there actually is any) about Todd's attitudes. The book apparently is replete with conventional, inside-the-beltway type of complaints that trivialize or ignore the actual merits of any policy.
Here are some snippets from the review:
Mr. Todd dissects “the promise versus the reality of Obama” and concludes that he will be regarded, at least in the near future, as “a president whose potential wasn’t realized.” He writes that “income inequality is worse than ever,” that the Middle East could well be “more unstable when Obama leaves office than when he took it,” and that while he “wanted to soar above partisanship,” his tenure in office will likely “be remembered as a nadir of partisan relations.”
So, apparently Todd subscribes to the green-lantern theory that Obama had the power. all by himself, to fix generations-old problems of income equality and Middle east strife, and deserves blame for the hyper-partisanship.
The problems Todd identifies include:
what critics see as Mr. Obama’s passive leadership and lack of managerial experience; his disdain for, but inability to change, politics as usual in Washington; and his reluctance to reach out to Congress and members of both parties to engage in the sort of forceful horse trading (like Lyndon B. Johnson’s) and dogged retail politics (like Bill Clinton’s) that might have helped forge more legislative deals and build public consensus.
Short version, I suppose: Bill Clinton was a more successful president than Obama because he engaged in "retail politics." Presumably, Todd measures success solely by a president's favorability ratings and relationship with the press, rather than actual policy achievements.
Mr. Todd acknowledges the challenges the president faced entering office: a tottering economy, two wars inherited from the Bush administration, and an obstructionist Republican opposition. But he suggests that Mr. Obama was frequently his own worst enemy, allowing his temperamental inclinations (his detachment, his caution, his impatience with the often-irrational aspects of politics) to hobble the implementation of his vision of transformative change. Mr. Todd goes so far as to write that “Obama’s arrogance got the better of him,” and chides him for an unwillingness to apply the necessary elbow grease to make progress on difficult issues like gun control and immigration.
Once more, we hear the insider wisdom that
Obama is too detached, too cautious, too disdainful of "irrational aspects of politics." And it is Obama's fault that gun-control and immigration measures did not pass. Because - you know - presidents are omnipotent.
The review reveals many other similar nuggets, but I think you get the point.
UPDATE 1:
Just thought I'd add some comments from a very well-written review at the Columbian Journalism Review:
if The Stranger is revelatory, it’s not in the way Todd intended. For all his strengths (and they are myriad), Todd has written a disappointing book, a slab of pedestrian punditry marbled with occasional insight. The Stranger purports to tell the story of a president who couldn’t transcend his environment. The story it ultimately—and unwittingly—tells is of the perceptive political geek who couldn’t escape Beltway groupthink.
This review reveals that Todd does discuss, at least in part, GOP intransigence, but:
But far too often, Todd falls back on lazy, a-pox-on-both-houses thinking. He lambasts the GOP for its obduracy but upbraids Obama for not trying harder to win Republicans over anyway—this despite Todd’s own observation that Republicans had “perfected” the strategy of total obstruction, and that Republicans had come to see opposing Obama as a simple matter of “self-interest.”
So why advise Obama to keep ramming into the wall of obstruction again and again? Here another Beltway obsession rears its head: optics. Todd reasons that “you always want to be the one that ‘gets caught trying’ ” (never mind the result). The fixation with optics also comes through in Todd’s discussion of Obama’s policies. On a range of issues, from the stimulus to healthcare reform to Syria, Todd weighs in on how the process looked, while devoting barely a second’s thought to the policy’s merits. Near the end, Todd sums up thusly: “In the Obama era and for the presidents after him, style points would take on greater weight than ever, both at home and abroad.” It’s an observation that doubles as self-justification