Jay Cost at RCP looks at the three major errors Obama has made since he took office. Any one of them is serious and would cause any president problems. All three together at the same time may well prove the downfall of Obama.
If Scott Brown should defeat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election tomorrow, it will be a fitting metaphor for the political trajectory of President Obama’s first year in office. A year ago Democrats were talking about Obama as the next Franklin Roosevelt, and suggesting that they were on the cusp of an enduring majority. Today, they are struggling to hold Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat.
Coakley will rightly get most of the blame should Brown actually pull off what once seemed to be an impossible victory. Yet much of the responsibility will have to rest with Barack Obama, who has guided his party so poorly that it is having trouble making an appeal to voters in Massachusetts.
To put it bluntly, the Obama White House has been politically inept in the last year. It has made serious miscalculations, and today it is paying a price.
Ultimately, the reason for these errors goes back to the greenness of the Commander-in-Chief himself, who lacked executive experience and had little first-hand knowledge of the way Washington functions. He put together a team too full of Chicago strongmen, campaign hacks, and sympathetic “Friends of Barack.” Accordingly, he and his executive staff were ill prepared for managing the government. This led to three significant political blunders.
I’ll send you over to read the three blunders Cost sees. I’m quite sure that regular readers will be quite familiar with all of them.
The ugly fact is that Obama made another blunder yesterday. He again tried to blame all his problems – and Coakley’s – on George W. Bush. A year after taking office, Obama still cannot do anything but blame his predecessor. At some point, that begins to look like whining and immaturity.
I suspect that regular people passed that point some time ago and are really tired of the shrill cries that “it’s not my fault”. They expect a grownup in the White House, not a whiny child.
Good article, but I question Cost’s comparison to Wilson, at least in part. In the 1890s, Wilson wrote “Congressional Government,” arguing for a more parliamentary-style system. (Wilson thought the Constitution was a hindrance.) It was only later, especially after he became president, that he became an ardent exponent of presidential power. Indeed, Jonah Goldberg argues that Wilson’s presidency was our first “fascist moment.” (See Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” for a longer, fascinating discussion.)