More Bad News About Dysfunction in the Obama White House

As previously noted on this blog, James Carville came out raising Hell with Obama and suggested firings of White House staff and an urgent need to reset the agenda and the president's response to a GOP that seems to be controlling political conversation - at least as it exists nowadays in Washington. Now a piece in The Daily Beast looks at Ron Suskind’s new book Confidence Men and what will likely be a very unflattering image of a Barack Obama not even in control of his own staff and a man driven to try to please everyone all of the time and doomed to please most people - at least in the Democratic party base - none of the time. If the book's contents are as described, it will explain a great deal about a president who refuses to be a leader and who seems to be steering the Democrats(and the nation) toward disaster. The big question is whether or not Obama will wake up and try to change course. Here are some column highlights.

Confidence Men also confirms what we knew about Obama’s White House: that the president appointed the wrong economic team from the start, failed to crack down on the banks, and was Solomonic to a fault when formulating responses to the financial crisis (oh, and news flash: Larry Summers is hard to work with!).

But the indictment goes one mortifying step deeper: Geithner and Summers and Rahm Emanuel, and perhaps others, sometimes ignored Obama, refused to carry out his orders, and, in Summers’s case, mocked him, saying at one point to then-Budget Director Peter Orszag that “there’s no adult in charge” in the White House. And while I don’t yet know whether Suskind emphasizes this point, let’s carry the critique one step further: They did so, as far as we know, without suffering any consequences at all.

That’s the problem the book reveals. Adam Moss and Frank Rich of New York magazine did get an early copy and read it, and in an online dialogue posted over the weekend, they home in on what Rich calls Obama’s “intellectual blind spot.”

Obama was afraid to be the president. He listened to a dozen viewpoints and tried to come up with something that made everyone happy. Unfortunately, “everyone” included people on his team who were looking out for the banks more than for the public (or for their own boss), and it included people on Capitol Hill whose clear agenda was Obama’s political destruction.

What now? Fire the staff, as James Carville suggested last week? Actually, that couldn’t hurt, especially in Geithner’s case, and probably in Bill Daley’s (the apparent real target of Carville’s arrow). A dramatic gesture can help push the reset button. But it’s important that if they be replaced, they be replaced with the right kinds of people. Obama needs people who will push him to go against his instincts toward consensus. Tell him everything he doesn’t want to hear.

Most of all, remind him, and impolitely if need be, that there are millions and millions of Americans who invested great hope in him, and he has let them down. Let them down terribly. I wonder if anyone has ever uttered this deeply sad and plainly true sentence to the president’s face. If not, it’s high time.

Once Again Obama is Playing on the Wrong End of the Field

Reading various blogs and op-ed pieces, it seems that I am hardly the only one disgusted with weak kneed, Jell-O spine Barack Obama. While Mitt Romney is being pummeled with questions of whether he truly believes in anything, the same could well be said of Obama. Indeed, some are making the argument that Obama needs to be challenged in a primary fight for the Democratic Party nomination. Obama's approach time and time again seems to be to give up 50% of the farm before he even begins to confront the extremists of the GOP who care nothing for average citizens and want to restore the economic brutality of the Gilded Age of the robber barons. It drives me crazy and I worry what he will give away of Medicare and other social safety net issues! Ruth Marcus has a piece in the Washington Post that lays into Obama for precisely this reason. Here are some highlights:
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I’m no sports nut but I’ve spent enough time at kids’ soccer games to understand that it’s impossible to score if you’re playing on the wrong side of the field. Which is why I have found the White House strategy for dealing with Republicans on the deficit so befuddling.
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The fight over spending this fiscal year is a case in point. The prospect of a Republican takeover of the House was evident well before the election. The inevitable result was going to be more draconian cuts than would have been required if the spending bills were passed beforehand.
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In the aftermath of the Democrats’ losses, the entire debate played out in terms they were destined to lose. If the argument is framed solely in terms of budget cuts, Republicans always win: They are willing to out-cut Democrats. That inescapable tilt was exacerbated by the virtual absence of a White House message about the impact of a shutdown or the cuts themselves.
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In the final hours, Democrats rallied their troops with complaints about a Republican “war on women” — and held fast against eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood. But how many people knew that the House-passed budget would have eliminated all federal money for family planning? Hardly anyone — because the White House and Democrats weren’t telling them.
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A second, maddening example of the White House allowing the other side to frame the debate involves the longer-term fiscal picture. The president convened a commission on the topic and then abandoned it. First, he did not lift a finger to help his co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, assemble the 14 votes necessary to get the commission’s plan a congressional vote. Then, when the plan was released, the president pointedly declined to express a view.
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If the White House had weighed in on Simpson-Bowles before Ryan released his plan, it could have staked out an argument that the framework — a combination of spending cuts and tax increases — was correct but that some specifics (the precise mix of the two, the details of the Social Security fix) went too far in the conservative direction. Now the “reasonable” compromise would be between Simpson-Bowles on the leftward side and Ryan on the right.
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It [the White House]hurriedly arranged for a speech and slapped together what seems to be shaping up less as an Obama plan than as an endorsement of the Gang of Six approach. I’m all for the president weighing in — in fact, I’ve been recommending it for months. But I question the haste and timing: If the Gang of Six looks like the Democratic alternative to Ryan, its Republican members will be out on a limb. Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, who convened the gang along with Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, said the White House “threw us a little bit of a curveball” with its surprise Sunday announcement. And if the White House was going to support the Simpson-Bowles framework all along, why not do it earlier and take advantage of the momentum?
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The country desperately needs a leader, but in Obama we only have a follower. The lost opportunities resulting from his refusal to be a leader are staggering.

Obama's Missing Foot Soldiers

Harold Meyerson has a column in the Washington Post that looks at the Obama administration's apparent failure to mobilize its grass roots supporters via the Internet as it did during the campaign. Since I - and I suspect many other LGBT Americans - have unsubscribed from Obama's Organizing for America in disgust over the non-progress on LGBT issues such as DADT, DOMA and ENDA, I do not know personal knowledge of what is being disseminated. Personally, I believe that Obama's failure to forcefully push for change and use the presidency as a "bully pulpit" has greatly dampened spirits and left many disappointed and not just within the LGBT community. With Virginia elections coming in the fall, I hope the sense of malaise doesn't give a boost to the ultra far right GOP slate lead by Bob "Taliban Bob" McDonnell who is working hard to cast himself as a moderate when he is in fact anything but. Here are some column highlights:

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If you measure the Obama administration's campaign for health-care reform by its ability to win crucial support from major institutions, things are going swimmingly. . . . But if you measure the administration's campaign by the degree of street heat on legislators to enact a universal plan, the results look far less rosy.

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The problem begins with the administration's inability -- or disinclination -- to use its greatest political asset, the list of 13 million supporters that the Obama presidential campaign amassed last year. In 2008, that list was the wonder of the political world, enabling Barack Obama to run the best-funded campaign in history and to activate more volunteers than any candidate ever had.

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This year, however, the administration has asked far less of that list and received, not surprisingly, far less in return. . . . . "What made the presidential campaign so potent were clear goals and a strategy that made sense to people," says Marshall Ganz, one of liberal America's foremost organizing geniuses (who led training sessions for Obama campaign staffers and volunteers last year). Such goals and strategies are hard to discern today, and the participation of Obama volunteers has declined accordingly.

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the administration's willingness to limit the potential of its army of supporters and the progressive groups' unwillingness to try to create a movement (say, for single-payer health care) that goes beyond the administration's goals have all but ensured that legislators will feel no major pressure for systemic change as Congress crafts national policy.

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Are Obama and the Congressional Democrats throwing away the mandate for change that voters so clearly wanted? It would seem so and much of the problem stems from Obama's desire to play nice with Republicans who hate him rather than work to enact legislation desired by those who supported him.