If too many Democrats in the House defect, health care will be dead. The G.O.P. would be able to argue this fall, not without reason, that the party holding the White House and both houses of Congress cannot govern.
Maybe they can't govern. Maybe we need to make a "little list" of Democrats we can do without.
Meanwhile, Frank Rich goes on to say, if the Dems do -- finally -- "ram through" a health care bill, it will no longer be an issue. In the months remaining before November's elections the issue will be the economy. And there, sad to say, Obama isn't doing very well either.
... and not just because of the unemployment numbers. The leadership shortfall we’ve witnessed during Obama’s yearlong health care march — typified by the missed deadlines, the foggy identification of his priorities, the sometimes abrupt shifts in political tone and strategy — won’t go away once the bill does. This weakness will remain unless and until the president himself corrects it.
Obama is losing supporters among supporters and observers who are, at worst, neutral -- no question about it.
There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham has written about an “inspiration gap.” He sees the professorial president as “sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.” In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta has raised the perils of Obama’s overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the president was scheduled to appear on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” to celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest conversations center on the competence of Obama’s team.
Not least of which is Rahm Emanuel as the Washington Post seems to be arguing daily. But the most pressing questions are about Obama himself. We know what he's not: he works very hard to appear non-partisan. But who is he?
Well, according to Tom Ricks President Obama is all over the place. He's a gatherer of other people's ideas and very aware of the criticisms coming from the blogosphere.
Ricks cites Andrew Sullivan as a real influence on the president's thinking, but his interest has him following other blogs as well (unspecified except for Sullivan). Also, in the same interview, Ricks has plenty of good thing to say about the new president. Ricks, an expert on war and war in Iraq, thinks a) Iraq will blow up in our faces, b) we will be obliged to keep as many as 40,000 troops there for another couple of decades, c) Iran has a firm hold on its neighbor and uses Iraq against us, but d) the war was and always will be Bush's wrong war. At least Obama will emerged unscathed from what many see as a ticking time bomb in the mideast. It is inescapably Bush's mess and has been from the get-go.
This president has plenty of troubles of his own, Many if not all are also Bush legacies. But they are all too easily blamed on Bush's successor(s). As Frank Rich points out, Obama has been very slow to respond forcefully.
... Leadership on financial reform, as with health care, has been delegated to bipartisan Congressional negotiators poised to neuter it. The protracted debate that now seems imminent — over whether a consumer protection agency will be in the Fed or outside it — is again about the arcana of process and bureaucratic machinery, not substance. Since Obama offers no overarching narrative of what financial reform might really mean to Americans in their daily lives, Americans understandably assume the reforms will be too compromised or marginal to alter a system that leaves their incomes stagnant (at best) while bailed-out bankers return to partying like it’s 2007. Even an unimpeachable capitalist titan like Warren Buffett, venting in his annual letter to investors last month, sounds more fired up about unregulated derivatives and more outraged about unpunished finance-industry executives than the president does.
This time Obama doesn’t have a year to arrive at his finest hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the clock runs out on Nov. 2.
