I am listening early Saturday morning to a rebroadcast of NPR's "On Point". The show is Friday's regular "week in review". Regular participant, Jack Beatty, is again critizicing Obama for not articulating a clear vision for his second term. As readers know, this is a theme of the Romney campaign but has also been a theme for the media including liberals like Jack Beatty in the past few weeks.
I am trying to understand why this has not resonated for me and whether in fact Obama has failed to do this. I see the achievements of the first term as incomplete and requiring much more work to implement, from the Affordable Care Act to Dodd-Frank financial reform. In fact here in Massachusetts, implementation of "Romneycare" has been a central feature of two terms for Governor Deval Patrick so implementation of Obamacare will equire major focus by the administration. If President Obama can successfully implement Obamacare over the next four years, he will have accomplished more than any President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in my judgement.
Perhaps the central difficulty of articulating a larger vision for the second term is the recalcitrance of the Republicans in Congress. Any discussion of major new initiatives in the second term necessarily raises the question of how Obama can move an agenda in Congress.
The one place where I see the "vision" criticism as being justified is on climate change. He is talking about some of the important things we need to do about climate change but not putting them in a climate change frame. This seems likely to be a polling driven decision but given recent polling data that 67% of Americans do believe climate change is real it may be short sighted.