One of the things I appreciate about this site is the insistence on intellectual honesty among diarists. Rather than being a collection of "me too" opinions, most diaries here make valid attempts to back assertions with facts, to base opinions on, and to draw conclusions that are in concert with substantive, tangible reality.
Those who don't are quickly dismissed for engaging in meta diaries. Since an intellectual giant I'm not, I presume this will become one of the disdained "metas" we all love to hate. So, I'll apologize to the tiny handful of people who will read it, in advance.
So much for meeting the standards I admire.
Morris Udall, who remains to this day one of my political heroes (and admiring the man who, in 1976, ran second to Jimmy Carter from New Hampshire all the way through to the Democratic National Convention should tell you how low-brow is my taste in political heroes), put his finger on the essential problem of finding a decent President. He always believed that the best President would be one who was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Oval Office. Anyone who wanted -- who in the famous term he coined, had the "fire in the belly" -- to be President should be automatically disqualified.
What ol' Mo understood and acknowledged was that personal ambition is a fatal flaw in a President. The moment a candidate (or a sitting President) begins to conflate their own ability to be elected or re-elected with "success," that person is doomed to fail and utterly incapable of leading.
I absolutely agree. Sadly, President Obama is the latest example of that fatal flaw -- and the "Satan Sandwich" is it's latest iteration.
The only way to play the REAL game of politics is to go in with the idea that every battle is one that requires a single-minded pursuit of the perfect solution. The notion that "the good is often a victim of the perfect" is completely backwards. Good more often EMERGES from the flames of brinksmanship that accepts only perfection.
Sure, brinksmanship carries the risk of getting cut off at the knees -- or, more to the horror of politicians, getting cut off at the polls. But, if you separate your own electoral prospects from the real value of succeeding, you'll find your name associated with the only characteristic that ought to matter: Leadership.
Politics, at its best -- and that is the only kind of politics we can afford -- SHOULD be a war between competing ideas and ideals. Politicians, at their best -- and that is the only kind of politicians we can afford -- SHOULD be willing to fall as casualties of that war. That, and ONLY that, is leadership.
Instead of slinking away from the battle, Progressives -- and the Presidents we elect -- should wade in with swords brandished. Every insipid Right Wing bumper sticker slogan has a resonant, Progressive counter-argument. A President whose goal is to lead -- THIS President -- needs to put nicety aside and make those arguments with as much vigor and single-mindedness as the opposition!
If the Right Wing yells, "Redistribution of wealth! Socialism!", we should, in one voice, roar back, "Wall Street is filled to the brim with Socialists! We already redistribute wealth from the middle class to the billionaires. The REAL 'welfare queens' wear Brooks Brothers suits and stick their snouts all the way up to their beady pig eyes in the public trough, stealing middle class tax dollars on defense contracts, bailouts and jobs they send overseas to artificially pump up profits!"
When intransigent Blue Dogs carried Republican water in the Stimulus, and watered it down with tax cuts, the President should have said, "No. If this doesn't produce the Keynesian effect it's designed to produce, the whole country loses. Oppose me, and I will feed you your political kneecaps."
When the Tea Partiers scream, "No poor man ever gave me a job," our President needs to bellow back: "No billionaire ever got rich without selling their stuff to the middle class. If we let their blind, stupid greed destroy the middle class, we won't have any billionaires left, either."
This President doesn't LEAD because he considers every policy goal a card to play or discard tactically. Until he intends to bluff all the way to the end of the hand, he will always fail to accomplish anything more than brewing weak tea with his agenda.
Health Insurance Reform never should have moved beyond two set positions at war with each other: Single Payer versus Private, Market-Based Insurance.
A leader, rather than a politician with one eye on re-election, would have framed the argument in concrete terms -- "The biggest problem with Private Insurance is that they slice-and-dice their risk pool into employer groups of 20, or 50 or 100. That makes high premiums necessary in order to hedge against catastrophic health claims. So, unless they agree to use their ENTIRE policy-holder base as the actuarial risk group -- which is how they calculate profits, but avoid like the plague in calculating premiums -- the Federal government will turn 300 million Americans into the most actuarially sound risk group in the known universe and offer catastrophic coverage to every citizen."
With their entire business model at risk -- whichever way the boot came down -- Insurance companies and their water-carriers would have negotiated from a high-wire...and we would have ended up with something far more palatable than the mish-mash of mandates and regulation that emerged.
In the same way, the "Satan Sandwich" should never have been on the table. A leader, rather than a politician with (now) both eyes on re-election, would have said, "If Congress doesn't give me a clean debt limit increase, I will invoke the 14th Amendment. Sure, that'll put everything into litigation, but if I lose, we'll already be past the crisis point. And, if I win, Congress will have lost a spending authority they don't want to lose. Now, let's play."
How willing, in the end, would Republicans in the Senate and the House have been to throw down and risk a loss of fiscal control over the President's agenda?
Would voters have spanked Obama for being intransigent? Perhaps. Or, they might have admired him for taking on the Tea Party ideology. Even in this place I live -- the rural 3rd District of Nebraska, which is one of the most doggedly Republican Congressional Districts in America -- the actual outcome of Tea Party ideology is not a direction most of my neighbors want to see the country go.
We'll never know which way it would have been, because our President conflated his re-election prospects with success. By failing to stand for Democratic principles based on the notion that Independents love them some centrism, President Obama has turned his promising tenure into a mushy soup of...well...nothing.
Oh, Mo...once again, you've been proven correct.
So, Meta as it may be, that is the reality I see. I'm sure many disagree (though few will see this, LOL.) Have at it.