-I love the idea of killing partisanship, of everyone getting along, of politics getting tossed out the window...but I've always been concerned with how Obama thinks that's actually going to happen. From early on, his way of making "change" and "hope" happen always went back to people, and as he's seen in his first year of office, people like the way those concepts sound on their ears but don't necessarily know what they'll look like in reality (or like them when they do show up in reality). Or, if they're politicians, this happens:
[Joe Klein writing] "I asked Obama how he thought his Administration was perceived by someone in the Boston suburbs who had supported him a year ago, looking for "change" — and now saw the President making deals with everyone from Joe Lieberman to the labor unions to Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska (whose special Medicaid deal was a public embarrassment) to the pro-life forces, not to mention the drug and insurance companies. 'When I promised change, I didn't promise that somehow members of Congress weren't going to be looking to try to get a project in their district or help a hospital in their neighborhood,' the President said halfheartedly."
-Klein points out that Obama hasn't done much this year to see people in their current plights, experiencing economic hardships. I agree. The ever-present campaigner hasn't been hanging out with everyday Americans very much, and what ever happened to him being like FDR and using the Internet to have fireside chats with the American people all the time?
-The health care agenda Obama so vociferously pursues is "peripheral to most Americans, who have relentlessly told pollsters, by huge majorities, that they are happy with the health care they currently receive and far more worried about other things." Exactly. Why the heck is Obama still letting Pelosi run rabid on this one? It's not like he birthed this bill himself; it's an amalgamation of all he says he hates about Washington, waiting for his signature. And the people don't even want it.
-"His has been a serious and substantive presidency. But the question, a year in, is whether it has been politically tone-deaf — and why the best presidential orator in a generation finds it so hard to explain himself to the American people." For all the things the Republicans are complaining about, has anyone noticed they're not complaining anymore about how he woos people with his words?
-One of Obama's biggest obstacles was that, even if he did want that bipartisanship thing, he wasn't even getting token participation from the elephants in the room:
"Obama came to office attempting bipartisanship. The Republicans weren't buying. 'The classic example being me heading over to meet with the House Republican caucus to discuss the stimulus,' the President said, 'and finding out that [minority leader John] Boehner had already released a statement stating, We're going to vote against the bill before we've even had a chance to exchange ideas.'"If John McCain was the President, those Republicans would have wanted the Democrats to jump on board, since the economy was in the crapper and needed some kind of fix. But the Republicans were playing us-against-them from day one (and the Dems have been, too).
-And the clincher: Is bipartisanship the kind of change Obama no longer believes in?
"By August, the President was saying privately that he didn't know if bipartisanship was possible when the polls said that a third of the opposition party didn't even think he was an American citizen."-Obama's comment on a question about the Middle East peace process is telling as to how his perspective has changed:
"...if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations so high."Whew.
My gut reaction is that Washington is going to stay partisan, and the Republicans are going to remain critical (of his policies, his star power, his speaking) — so why doesn't he just do his best to connect with the people? Because if they want bipartisanship enough, wouldn't they vote for others like him?
(Or did he blow that chance by being, ahem, partisan and pushing a very liberal health care bill through?)
Year two will be interesting.
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