My claim central claim in the comment was that it is the political job of the President to take on and defeat his enemies in the public sphere, and that if Obama has failed to accomplish this job, it is best to recognize that failure and address it, rather than make excuses for it.

I submit that Team Obama has shown itself to have an atrocious communications operation, and that the chief responsibility for the atrocity starts at the top. Obama has turned himself into a mysterious sphinx of a President, leaving it to all and sundry to <i>guess</i> his political positions and personal views on the things they care most about, and thus leaving it to his enemies to fill in the blanks with fabrications of their own.

 Obama has failed to communicate effectively about those things he has done right.  But more importantly, he has failed to achieve as much as he could have achieved, and has been forced to aim low on his agenda items, because he has failed to persuade and mobilize Americans to support a more ambitious agenda.

This is quite a disappointing development for a man whose chief promise as a candidate was his rhetorical command.  I suspect many were attracted to Obama in the first place because he seemed like a guy who knew how to sell a progressive agenda to the public, and move the ideological needle to the left.  But "No Drama Obama" has turned out to be very uptight and buttoned-up President, constantly running and ducking from controversy, and apparently reluctant to speak from his heart or mind on matters that deviate from safe, conventional opinion and pre-existing consensus.

As a result, while the country's legislative and executive policy agenda has certainly moved to at least a slightly left-of-center, the ideological needle keeps drifting to the right, and the result is an administration straining uphill against stiff ideological winds even to accomplish a <i>moderately</i> progressive agenda.

To test your own impressions of the silent Obama phenomenon, here is a quiz. Answer each of the following questions, in a single sentence, and as quickly as possible in each case, and without looking elsewhere on the web for more information:

1. What, according to Barack Obama, is the single most important challenge facing America in 2010?

2. What is Barack Obama's view on the primary cause of the Great Recession?

3. What is the centerpiece of Barack Obama's agenda for reform of the financial sector?

4. What is the most fundamental conclusion that Barack Obama drew from the Gulf oil spill?

5. What, according to Barack Obama, is our national goal in Afghanistan?

6. What, according to Barack Obama, is the most important area of failure of our health care system, as it is currently constituted?

7. What, according to Barack Obama, is the single most important thing we can do to fix this most important area of failure in our health care system?

8. What is the centerpiece of Barack Obama's agenda for America? That is, if Barack Obama remains in office as President for eight years, what in his eyes is the most fundamental way in which America in 2016 will differ from America in 2008?

9. What, according to Barack Obama, is the most important national security challenge facing the United States in 2010?

10. What concrete foreign policy outcome is the highest priority item on Obama's foreign policy agenda?

11. Of all the things Barack Obama has done so far, which will produce the greatest tangible benefit for you personally?

12. Of all the things Barack Obama has done so far, which will produce the greatest tangible benefit for your children, or your closest loved ones?

13. What, for you, is the most memorable public statement that Barack Obama has issued since he was inaugurated? (Please provide something close to an exact quote, not just an allusion to a speech.)

14. According to Barack Obama, is wealth in the United States (i) more or less fairly distributed, (ii) somewhat unfairly distributed, or (iii) very unfairly distributed?

15. Of all the things Barack Obama has done so far, which will have the greatest impact on income distribution in the United States?

16. Is it Barack Obama's view that the Islamic Republic of Iran is (i) certainly trying to build a nuclear weapon, (ii) probably trying to build a nuclear, (iii) probably not trying to build a nuclear weapon, or (iv) certainly not trying to build a nuclear weapon? Or is it his view that it is impossible to say one way or another?

17. Is it Barack Obama's view that defense spending in the United States is (i) far larger than necessary, (ii) somewhat larger than necessary, (iii) more or less just right, (iv) somewhat less than necessary or (v) far less than necessary?

18. What is the key component of Barack Obama's strategy for preserving the natural beauty and resources of America?

19. If Barack Obama could wave a wand and guarantee that every graduating high school student had learned some particular subject, skill or item of knowledge that we are currently failing to teach them, what would that knowledge, skill or item of knowledge be?

20. Does Barack Obama believe that the influence of the entertainment industry on America is (i) on the whole positive, (ii) on the whole neutral or (iii) on the whole negative?

21. Does Barack Obama believe that the influence of the blogosphere on America is (i) on the whole positive, (ii) on the whole neutral or (iii) on the whole negative?

22. Does Barack Obama believe that by 2020 Americans should be (i) driving less on average, (ii) driving about the same on average or (iii) driving more on average?

23. Does Barack Obama believe that by 2020 newly retired Americans should be (i) relying more on private savings and less on social insurance than currently, (ii) relying less on private savings and more on social insurance than currently, or (iii) relying on both social insurance and private savings in about the same ratio they are now?

24. Does Barack Obama believe that by 2020 Americans should (i) have a higher percentage of developed land to wild places, (ii) have a lower percentage of developed land to wild places, or (iii) have about the same percentage of developed land to wild places?

25. What is the central theme or principle that unites the answers to most of the above questions?

.......................

Clearly, these questions reflect some of my own preoccupations, and any one of you could think of a somewhat different list of questions.  But my contention is that Americans have far less of a sense than they ought to by this point of what the answers to these questions are.

A President isn't just a list of canned policy positions and slogans to be arranged on a White House web site.  They are human beings with values and attitudes, likes and dislikes.  And their ability to connect with voters and move those voters to support their agenda depends on their ability to develop a bond of trust and camaraderie with those voters.  I really felt that Obama was making a connection during the latter stages of his campaign.  But since he has become President, the wall has gone up, and he has become more and more of a mystery.

Obama used to let a few things slip out from time to time that gave hints about his overall views about contemporary American life and society.  And he used to tell more jokes.  But after being hit with predictable smacks from the right each time, it seems he has decided to clam up.  Instead of backing down each time he is criticized, maybe he should consider doubling down and upping the ante?

The Gulf oil spill represents a major failure by the US government.  The analogies with Katrina are misleading, because the issue here is not just the government response to a disaster, but the government's prior responsibility for the disaster.  Even if it were to turn out that the government response has been exemplary, that doesn't get them off the hook for their failure to prevent the disaster in the first place.

The spill is not an act of God, like a hurricane.  It is a human-made disaster.  The executive branch of the US government is charged with watching and regulating the corporations who are permitted to exploit our environment and natural resources.  The laws are on the books that would have enabled the government to regulate this bold and risky deep water project more competently.   They have failed to do their job, and in a very spectacular way.

BP and other firms should never have been permitted to drill an extremely deep and inaccessible well of this kind without a well-tested and adequate plan in place to close the well if it blew out.  It is clear now that neither BP nor the federal government possessed this capability, and they are now scrambling to invent something on the fly while a man-made eruption of oil fills the Gulf of Mexico with poison.  This is inexcusable negligence, and outrageous.   It is like permitting open bonfires and trash burning in a neighborhood in a dry climate without having adequate firefighting skills and equipment on hand.

Even when we focus entirely on the response, and not the bungling that caused the disaster, we find the response probably has not been exemplary: there is growing concern that the US government might be implicated in helping BP cover up the extent of the damage.  That is ongoing behavior that cannot be blamed on the previous administration.

Obama is the head of the executive branch.  He's in charge; it's his government now.  Obama has said several things about this spill - some good, some bad.  But so far, he has failed to say "I'm sorry."  He has failed to assume ownership of his own administration, and accept responsibility for its failures.

Given that he came into office with an extremely healthy margin of victory and great popular enthusiasm, winning states that no Democrat had won in years; and given that during the months of his transition and inauguration the country was faced with an economic catastrophe and social upheaval of the most dire kind, and was desperate for confident leadership and creative thinking; I believe Obama had a much larger potential to define the nature of our historic circumstances, describe the shape of progress in bold terms and seize control of the national agenda than David appears to think.

Obama never emotionally accepted that the political circumstances he landed in following his election were destined to be very different from the ones in which he campaigned. He didn't understand that extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary innovation and leadership, and a spirit of creative improvisation. He didn't understand that in the rapidly metamorphosing political environment, the agenda he ran on could not be the agenda he pursued in office. Rather than strike out boldly toward real change and an inspirationally transformed future, Obama clung to his restorationist agenda of bringing back the nineties and the rapidly unraveling economic consensus of that Reagan-haunted neoliberal era. In other words, he failed to "embrace change".

The United States economy suffers from enduring structural weaknesses due to a pathological institutional aversion to allowing its government to fulfill mature state responsibilities for setting a strategic economic agenda, and for organizing national-scale and long term public investments. Our feckless and prostituted political class refuses to assert the sovereignty of the government of the people over the private sector. The country still puts its faith in an overly indulged and poorly regulated financial and entrepreneurial class, and the discredited invisible hand magic of mere self-seeking and hustling, with its wasteful and dissolute attendant scramble after immediate-term and short-term opportunity. Obama was handed an historical opportunity, like his hero Ronald Reagan, to define an "Obama Revolution". But he blanched, and he passed. And we have all missed the opportunity he failed to seize.

I am struck above all by the mediocrity and conventionalism of his administration. Instead of reaching out the country's most creative thinkers and game-changing boat rockers, he chose to surround himself with smart, but very conventional technocrats and retreads. His staffing of his administration seems to have been based on a direction to John Podesta to "round up the usual suspects."

Obama has also missed the boat on foreign affairs, choosing a holdover from the Bush administration for his Secretary of Defense, and a appointing a language-mangling and unpersuasive Secretary of State who was chosen for domestic political reasons - and who appears to be dispirited and mentally exhausted to boot. He has also fundamentally accepted the Bush administration's faulty analysis of the global scene and global security priorities. Obama has tried to soften that Bush-era world view by displaying less of the blunt cocksureness of Bush, and by deploying some of the soft-sell public diplomacy air-brushing beloved by our foreign policy sales weasels. But the product is still as bad as ever. And the US is still dragging its anchor on the bottom with its fatal attraction to the Middle East and that region's local politics. The rest of the world seems already to have turned its attention to more important matters with an inward laugh and indulgent smile at the bumbling old US. The United States' global outlook still languishes in backwardness, ideological obsession and hidebound conservatism.

David praises the revived nuclear non-proliferation agenda. But when Obama was given a dream opportunity, by virtue of his Nobel Prize, to rivet the world's attention and enlist its large rising generation in a transformational global agenda, he instead decided to give a petulant professorial apology for the use of force by the Indispensable Nation, in a speech that seemed more aimed at appeasing conservative critics at home than raising the hopes and firing the imaginations of a young world looking for global leadership and the Next Big Thing. Once again: buck passed and opportunity foregone.

One thing I know: the established Democratic Party in the United States is now a talent-bare, idea-poor, polling obsessed and courage-deprived husk. Just look at our top dogs from the last election: Edwards and Clinton have been revealed to be strikingly vacuous mediocrities. A party that is filled with so many empty shells and desert wanderers is ripe for a takeover by any courageous and authentic thinker with the vision to seize the day. But so far, that has not happened.

On Strike
  
   UFFD