Lessons Obama Needs to Learn

I have been very critical of President Obama's first year in office and I believe justifiably so. Not only has Obama - and the Congressional Democrats - failed to deliver on campaign promises and caused complacency if not out right anger among the Democrat base, but he/they have allowed the Republicans to shape all of the discussion and unduly influence legislative efforts. The abortion of a health care reform bill now in conference is a prime example. It does little or nothing of what was promised during the campaign and seems to mostly benefit health insurers and drug manufacturers. E.J. Dionne has a column in the Washington Post that looks at the mess that Obama has made of controlling the debate and messaging that the Democrats need to take to heart - along with the need to deliver on campaign promises. Otherwise, look for a loss in Massachusetts and elsewhere as the independents are co opted by the lying Republicans and the Democrat base stays home. Here are some highlights:

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In June 2008, a few months before the financial implosions began, I asked two smart financiers who happened to be Republican about the future of the seemingly shaky American economy.
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Defying the moment's conventional predictions that we would somehow muddle through, one offered a dire and uncannily accurate forecast. He explained why banks would blow up, investments would crash and the federal government would have to spend "at least $300 billion" to bail out financial institutions.
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The other financial expert listened closely, took a sip from his drink, and smiled. "This," he said, "would seem like an excellent time for the Democrats to take power." It wasn't that he liked Democratic policies. He just wanted the other side in charge when things came tumbling down.
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I have thought often of that exchange while watching Obama and the Democrats struggle with the country's understandably cantankerous mood. Although the economy hit the skids on President Bush's watch, it's the party in office that suffers the consequences when things get really bad.
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Underlying so much of the political analysis pouring forth over the Massachusetts showdown is a debate about the reasons for the decline of Obama's popularity from the heights of last spring. . . . The conservatives' focus on ideology, they say, is an opportunistic way of distracting attention from the mistakes of the Bush years and the role conservative policies played in bringing us to this point. To cite ideology rather than the economy in explaining the poll numbers is like analyzing the causes of Civil War without any reference to slavery or the rise of the New Deal without mention of the Great Depression.
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It's not surprising that I lean toward the second set of explanations, and I wish my conservative friends would be as honest as the Republican investor was in acknowledging that presiding over bad times always hurts the party stuck with the job.
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[T]he success of the conservative narrative ought to trouble liberals and the Obama administration. The president has had to "own" the economic catastrophe much earlier than he should have. Most Americans understand that the mess we are in started before Obama got to the White House. Yet many, especially political independents, are upset that the government has had to spend so much and that things have not turned around as fast as they had hoped.
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It's also striking that most conservatives, through a method that might be called the audacity of audacity, have acted as if absolutely nothing went wrong with their economic theories. They speak and act as if they had nothing to do with the large deficits they now bemoan and say we will all be saved if only we return to the very policies that should already be discredited.
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[T]he truth that liberals and Obama must grapple with is that they have failed so far to dent the right's narrative, especially among those moderates and independents with no strong commitments to either side in this fight. . . . Ronald Reagan's numbers went down during a slump, too. But even when he was in the doldrums, Reagan was laying the groundwork for a critique of liberalism that held sway in American politics long after he left office.
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Progressives will never reach their own Morning in America unless they use the Gipper's method to offer their own critique of the conservatism he helped make dominant. It is still more powerful in our politics, as we are learning in Massachusetts, than it ought to be.