If you didn't catch Drew Westen's analysis of what's wrong with Obama's governing style when it came out last December, please read it now.
Personally, I think the Administration should have given Westen a desk right outside the Oval Office door when they moved in. Things might be a lot different today.
Continue on for Westen's concluding paragraphs…
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.
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.
I don't honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn't figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he's not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he's going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they're seeing right now is "liberalism," and they don't like what they see. I don't, either.
What's they're seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That's a recipe for going nowhere fast -- but getting there by November.
Let me repeat that: "[T]he average American is coming to believe that what they're seeing right now is 'liberalism,' and they don't like what they see." Half-measures, backroom deals, an inordinate protectiveness toward the banksters who wrecked the economy, and a complete failure to fight for any actual convictions: what's to like? Where, oh where, is FDR exclaiming proudly and loudly to the economic royalists, "I welcome your hatred!"
Link to the full article
