Re: OT - American Politics
Here's a well detailed paper from the Brookings Institute titled, "President Barack Obama’s First Two Years: Policy Accomplishments, Political Difficulties" - Nov 4, 2010
a few highlights but I recommend reading the whole thing.
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During his first two years in office, President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress compiled a substantial record of policy accomplishment—the economic stimulus, bringing the financial system back from the brink of collapse, rescuing two automakers, universal health care, sweeping reform of financial regulation, and major changes in student loan programs, among many others. Nevertheless, the political standing of both the president and congressional Democrats slipped steadily through much of this period, and the voters administered a substantial rebuke in the November 2010 midterm elections....
What went wrong? There are four broad schools of thought.
The first— popular among mainstream liberals, and the most supportive of the president—focuses on the unusual quantity and nature of problems that Obama inherited when he took the oath of office......
In reality, the divide between the parties and between red and blue America went well beyond incivility to embrace disagreements on core principles and conceptions of how the world works. Bridging this divide, if possible at all, would have taken much more than a change of tone in the White House. It would have required, as well, a policy agenda that breached traditional partisan bounds. But there was little in Obama’s agenda that corresponded to Bill Clinton’s heterodox positions on crime, welfare, trade, and fiscal restraint. Instead, Obama synthesized and advocated policies representing the consensus within the Democratic Party. Republicans rejected that agenda as a basis for reaching common ground.....
The second explanation, associated with the left wing of the Democratic Party, argues that Obama failed politically, not because he was too partisan, but because he wasn’t partisan enough; not because he went too far, but because he didn’t go far enough
There is something to this critique as well. Given the intensity of the polarization that predated his presidency, Obama did underestimate the difficulty of mitigating it. Even the White House’s strongest defenders concede that the health care debate went on much longer than it should have, with negative consequences for the rest of Obama’s agenda. And his administration’s kid-glove treatment of big banks and AIG was morally and politically tone-deaf....
For the most part, however, the critique from the left fails the test of political realism. The administration couldn’t have gotten a larger stimulus bill, even if it had pushed hard; nor could it have passed health reform with a public option, let alone the liberal beau ideal, a single-payer system. The reason is the same in both cases: not only were Republicans unanimously opposed, but so were many Democrats. What the liberals overlook is that unlike the Republican Party, Democrats are a diverse ideological coalition, split roughly 40/40/20 among liberals, moderates, and conservatives at the grassroots level. In the country as a whole, moreover, liberals constitute only one fifth of the electorate and cannot hope to succeed outside a coalition with Americans to their right.....
There is also a third explanation, a critique from the right: while Obama campaigned as a moderate conciliator, he governed as a liberal activist, undermining the possibility of bipartisan cooperation and preventing himself from overcoming the divide between Red and Blue America. His efforts to bring Republicans into the conversation were largely cosmetic and were inconsistent with the role he allowed House Democratic leaders to play in the legislative process.
As we’ll see, there are some elements of truth in this critique as well. There was indeed a tension at the heart of the Obama campaign between the rhetoric of post-partisanship and the substance of the agenda. Once in office, Obama could have tried harder to restrain Democratic partisanship in the House and to build Republican concerns into his health care proposals.
Nonetheless, one overriding fact undermines the plausibility of the critique from the right. After their defeat in 2008, Republicans quickly reached a consensus on the cause: voters had punished them, not because they had been too conservative, but rather because they hadn’t been conservative enough. They had come to Washington to cut spending and limit government, but under George W. Bush, they concluded, they had become the reverse—a party that used government programs to cement its majority....
In this paper, I will argue for a fourth explanation. The gist of it is this: Yes, American history is replete with examples of presidents and parties who experience political difficulties in hard economic times, only to regain public esteem as the economy regains its balance. But there is more to the losses that President Obama and the Democratic Party suffered in November 2010: the public punished them, not only for high unemployment and slow growth, but also for what it regarded as sins of both commission and omission. The White House and congressional leaders pursued an agenda that the people mostly rejected while overlooking measures that might well have improved the economy more, and almost certainly would have been more popular, than what they did instead. In short, while Obama was dealt a bad hand, he proceeded to misplay it, making the political backlash even worse than it had to be.
There's far more to this paper than I've cherry picked.....so enjoy the read
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2010/1104_obama_galston.aspx
