Failure Accompli
The excuse-making starts. Here’s the Daily Beast with Yglesias, the 20-something boy wonder whose long view of history convinces him failure is not only unavoidable, it’s laudably presidential. The notion that it might be due to inexperience, hubris, poor political skills, gross incompetence, that kind of thing, isn’t addressed in Matt’s explanation of why a big electoral mandate for change, the tide of history and single-party control of the White House, House and Senate apparently count for nothing. He notes simply that “reform is hard to do.”
In other 20-something deep thot, NYT conservative token Ross Douthat also is making excuses for the President of the United States:
If the Congressional Democrats can’t get a health care package through, it won’t prove that President Obama is a sellout or an incompetent. It will prove that Congress’s liberal leaders are lousy tacticians, and that its centrist deal-makers are deal-makers first, poll watchers second and loyal Democrats a distant third. And it will prove that the Democratic Party is institutionally incapable of delivering on its most significant promises.
You have to assume that on some level Congress understands this — which is why you also have to assume that some kind of legislation will eventually pass.
If it doesn’t, President Obama will have been defeated. But it’s the party, not the president, that will have failed.
OK, I get the point. He’s damning Obama with the faint praise due a cipher while mocking the Dems’ inability to govern. As he says, health care is their signature issue. And as we’ve observed previously, they have trouble advancing anything they feel deeply about that doesn’t involve a lot of pork. But cipher or not, Obama is also the president of a one-party government, and if his party can’t govern, he doesn’t get off that easy. He still gets to be a failure and is the one who will ultimately wear it.
Never mind. The good news is that the amorphous blob of health-care reform that Obama was pushing appears to be going down the drain, and if he wants to be successful at all with this or anything else, he may have to come up with something that makes sense.
Welcome Punditeers, etal. Always so good to see you. In other failure-mongering developments this morning, we’re looking at Afghanistan and asking Obama to Be All You Can Be.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:23 am on Monday, August 24, 2009
5 Responses to “Failure Accompli”
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August 25th, 2009 at 5:22 am
You wrote “the amorphous blob of health-care reform that Obama was pushing appears to be going down the drain”
The government demands detailed, researched Environmental Impact Statements before starting a building. We should have Official Policy Impact Statements before our representatives change our society.
We need proposed results, expected evolution, methods, justifications, comparative studies, past successes of similar policy, funding sources, expected difficulties, the works.
I hope people of all parties and positions could agree that this is fundamental. It is non-partisan to demand that the President and all politicians show how they have carefully researched their proposals.
It is not our job to read tea leaves and pick apart 1000 page bills written in Old English to figure out what the bills are really saying. The bills are not enough. They are implementation, not coherent policy. We have been directed to look only at the bills as a tactic to make the press and public scratch for the underlying ideas.
Did Obama (or any politician) start with such a policy study, or not?
If so, then where is it? If not, then he is a fool. And we are fools if we accept legislation without explanation.
Is Obama legislating from some scribbles on a cocktail napkin?
Does he want to pass just anything, then rearrange it later to do what he wants?
Where is the policy paper?
If they won’t answer:
OK, so where is the cocktail napkin?
No Legislation Without Explanation
A Few Words About Policy
August 25th, 2009 at 7:48 am
As we’ve said before, who could have possibly predicted that a man with no executive or leadership experience…would have trouble leading and being an executive?
August 25th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Hurray for that, Mr Bingley! Who needs smart, ruthlessly efficient left-wingers? Before the election, whenever someone praised Obama as a uniquely gifted political genius - and there were many - I always asked them: Nice for him. That´s like saying “I trust that used car dealer - that guy can just sell anything!” The question you should be asking is: What´s in it for us?
But they never got it. Happily, they were wrong about the do-nothing one year senator being a genius.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Conservatives are celebrating a bit too soon. I’m still betting on a bill, albeit one that lacks some of the gaudier baubles featured in the early going.
August 27th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
“Official Policy Impact Statements”
It has a ring to it.