Which is why he’s not good at it. What he does he does out of habit, he’s not very effective, which is why I’m surprised that people don’t notice how cynical and insider the guy is.
Take his budget. A change agent would propose an honest, serious budget and challenge Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike to come up with better ideas if they didn’t like the tough choices he made.
An experienced political operator would either make his unserious budget look serious, or make tough choices and convince affected Americans they were getting candy rather than coal. Or use the Americans who were going to hate him for the cuts as foils, to show everyone else he was standing up to the special interests.
Instead, he put out a budget that he knew no one would take seriously, because that was politically less hazardous, in his judgment, than making specific proposals that would alienate important groups he needs for reelection. And I believe that judgment is mistaken. Bill Clinton responded to Republican budget plans with less radical plans of his own that balanced the budget a little slower. Obama responded with “we don’t have a plan, but we don’t like yours.” Actually, Geithner said that.
The only reason he even comes close to getting away with such transparent cynicalness and incompetence is because people really want to like him. They really want to believe the hype. Some even blame the system for forcing him to not be the change agent he supposedly would like to be.
What isn’t serious about his budget? It conforms to the budget deal made last year by Democrats and Republicans (that Republicans are now trying to undo).
Oh, come now. Virtually every budget submitted by a president to a Congress of a different party is “dead on arrival.” It’s such a common phrase it is a joke that’s still used. Even Clinton’s 2001 budget, which included a surplus of $171 billion, was called “dead on arrival” by Republicans. Your comments are harkening us back to a time that never existed.
I’m not quite sure what the point of this is either, especially in light of the substantial involvement in politics that Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt and others all had before becoming president.
I’m not sure that implementing a college football playoff was a campaign promise, but I am quite certain that he didn’t have anything to do with making it happen. The SEC West being so strong that the best 2 (maybe 3) teams in the country come from it meant that all of the other conferences were shut out of the NCG. That’s what brought the other conferences to the table.
I think it was a bad idea to say that he was going to throw his weight around to make it happen.
THe budget deal goes only 1/4th of the way towards getting our deficit down to a sustainable level in 10 years. A true leader would have a plan for the other 3/4ths. The Republicans put out such a plan. THe administration’s response: “We don’t have a plan. We just don’t like yours.”
Most budgets aren’t DOA to the President’s party as well. The last budget to be rejected unanimously was Reagan’s 1983 budget. And that budget wasn’t unserious, the cuts were just too deep for everyone in Congress. Reagan led, Congress didn’t want to follow. Obama punted, Congress was afraid of looking just as unserious.
Either their political experience contained a lot more variety(state and national, both legislative and executive positions), or they had substantial accomplishments outside of politics, or both. And even the ones with only legislative experience in one state didn’t come up through a famously corrupt establishment. State Senator Obama wasn’t corrupt himself, but unlike say, FDR, he didn’t fight that establishment either. He studiously avoided rocking the boat.