Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. CNN has his learned commentary on it's front page right now.
Zelizer thinks Obama would be a failure if "Obama could end his first year in the White House without a major piece of legislation beyond the economic stimulus."
Set aside the notion that the stimulus itself was a worthy accomplishment: its a total misreading of who Obama is and how is trying to govern.....
Obama is a student of the Constitution. He understands its history and application probably as well or better than any President.
I think Obama has made it clear that he sees the Executive branch as responsible to execute the law, not make it. I think he believes that if lawmakers make the laws, that those laws will be more responsive to what the people want and need, rather than laws being made by the lights of the perhaps fickle ideology of the one person who is President at a time. I think the founders had that arrangement in mind after their recent experiences.
He has shown this mode most dramatically in the heath care debate; he has handed the problem to Congress for better or worse at the moment.
Our own recent history of ever increasing imperial power for the Executive has not yielded much in the way of results: we are broke, feared, paralyzed, and angry as a nation.
CNN of course wants this to be the Moment of Truth because MoT's get good ratings. Their hired hack needs to find other presidential MoT's to make the point.
What does he pull ? FDR after Pearl Harbor !
"Some speeches have solidified the public confidence in the leadership skills of the president. On December 8, 1941, the day after Japanese forces had attacked American forces at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt spoke to Congress. In the speech, Roosevelt's words demonstrated a kind of decisiveness that would help to rally the public around the White House as the war escalated.
Is he kidding ? FDR had led the country for nine years thru the Depression and had been re-elected in a landslide. Does he really think the speech solidified confidence in him ?
The speech DID increase confidence as to what FDR wanted to do.
Tonight Obama does not need to bolster faith in his person: he needs to let people know what he wants. I hope he will say that he wants Congress to make the laws, and he wants to see to it that they are faithfully executed.
That would move the nation forward......