Noonan: At the end of the day, Obama didn't want to spend his political capital. That, ironically, is why his reputation seems increasingly bankrupt.
Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:
The talk this week was of who was most damaged politically by the failure of the super committee. The first, admittedly earnest answer is: the country. We have a projected deficit over the next 10 years of $44 trillion. A group of Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in cuts. Just 1.2 out of 44. Not that hard. And they couldn't do it. Everyone says we will now fight out the basic issues on which the committee failed to achieve agreement, taxes and spending, in the 2012 election. And we will. Maybe the electorate will yield up a clear answer and produce an obvious mandate. But maybe not. Maybe the big muddle will continue. Which won't be good, because that way we sink deeper in the ditch.
Super committee success would have been important for this reason: It would have shown us, and the world, that we are not Greece. That we aren't helpless, incapable, deadlocked, that we can take at least baby steps in the right direction.
The second party most damaged by the failure was President Obama, that grand strategic thinker who's always playing long ball. It is a time of unprecedented and continuing economic crisis, and he went AWOL. He didn't put his public prestige behind a good outcome, didn't corral the Democrats on the committee, which could have made a real difference. He thought the super committee would likely fail on its own, and if it did, it only backed up his narrative—that dread word—about a do-nothing Congress dominated by Republicans in thrall to their billionaire slave masters.
What he doesn't understand is that Americans are tired of hearing the words "In Washington today," followed by the words, "another failure to . . ." They think: Another failure under Obama. Can't this guy get anything done? Doesn't anything ever work under him?
That is what will damage him. At the end of the day, he didn't want to spend his political capital. That, ironically, is why his reputation seems increasingly bankrupt. Maybe the most harmful aspect of the president's leadership style is that all of his political instincts were honed and settled before 2008, when he was rising. What he learned before he reached the presidency is what he knows. But everyone else in America knows the crash and the underlying crisis it revealed—on our current course, we are bankrupt—changed everything. Strangely, inexplicably, the president thinks the old political moves apply to the new era. They do not.
The talk this week was of who was most damaged politically by the failure of the super committee. The first, admittedly earnest answer is: the country. We have a projected deficit over the next 10 years of $44 trillion. A group of Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in cuts. Just 1.2 out of 44. Not that hard. And they couldn't do it. Everyone says we will now fight out the basic issues on which the committee failed to achieve agreement, taxes and spending, in the 2012 election. And we will. Maybe the electorate will yield up a clear answer and produce an obvious mandate. But maybe not. Maybe the big muddle will continue. Which won't be good, because that way we sink deeper in the ditch.
Super committee success would have been important for this reason: It would have shown us, and the world, that we are not Greece. That we aren't helpless, incapable, deadlocked, that we can take at least baby steps in the right direction.
The second party most damaged by the failure was President Obama, that grand strategic thinker who's always playing long ball. It is a time of unprecedented and continuing economic crisis, and he went AWOL. He didn't put his public prestige behind a good outcome, didn't corral the Democrats on the committee, which could have made a real difference. He thought the super committee would likely fail on its own, and if it did, it only backed up his narrative—that dread word—about a do-nothing Congress dominated by Republicans in thrall to their billionaire slave masters.
What he doesn't understand is that Americans are tired of hearing the words "In Washington today," followed by the words, "another failure to . . ." They think: Another failure under Obama. Can't this guy get anything done? Doesn't anything ever work under him?
That is what will damage him. At the end of the day, he didn't want to spend his political capital. That, ironically, is why his reputation seems increasingly bankrupt. Maybe the most harmful aspect of the president's leadership style is that all of his political instincts were honed and settled before 2008, when he was rising. What he learned before he reached the presidency is what he knows. But everyone else in America knows the crash and the underlying crisis it revealed—on our current course, we are bankrupt—changed everything. Strangely, inexplicably, the president thinks the old political moves apply to the new era. They do not.
posted by Sid Cottingham | 10:08 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home