Obama's pivotal strategy

Don't count Obama out yet (see Richard's last comment #4 on the 1/18 posting). Here's what seems to be his strategy, and I think it is the right one at this point, the only thing that can possibly let him recover politically:

1. Acknowledge his failure as one of loss of connection with the people rather than one of ideology or intent.

2. Associate himself with the anger of the people who elected Brown and pivot to focus on issues that will reclaim some of that support. Although I have avoided reading much of the aftermath, I did see a quote, I think from his interview with Stephanopolis, saying that the voter dissatisfaction with Washington that elected Brown is the same dissatisfaction that elected him.

Now that's not just as facile as it sounds. I think he's right -- at least to some extent. In 2008, voters were fed up with the broken system in Washington. And they elected Obama to change it. He tried to change it, but the system defeated him instead.

Now we can argue (and Richard will) that Obama took the wrong pathway, trying to compromise and not being bold and showing strong leadership. That may well be right, but I doubt that would have worked either.

The tendency is to blame it all on Obama's wrong choices and his failed leadership. I agree that I am disappointed, very disappointed in him. He isn't able to walk on water, after all. I wish he had been able to inspire or muscle through all the progressive legislation that we expected. After all, didn't we give him a mandate? Didn't we give him a majority and control of both houses of Congress -- even 60 votes in the Senate?

Well, yes. But although the voters gave him a mandate, they didn't give him a fully supportive Congress. It was Rahm Emanuel's strategy to build up the House majority by running very conservative Democrats in Republican-leaning districts and winning those elections. That gave us control of the committees and the agenda, but they were not reliable progressive votes -- i.e., the Blue Dog Democrats, who gave the House committees fits on health care long before the Senate debacle. (In defense of Rahm's strategy, if he'd tried to run liberals the Republicans would have won.) And without Lyndon Johnson's arm-twisting skills or the kind of party discipline that makes the Republicans so formidable, we had trouble.

The Senate was an even more dicey affair. We seem to be forgetting that until near the election time, we didn't even have much hope of winning a 60 vote margin. It wasn't until 2 months after the election, when Franken was finally seated, that we did have the 60 votes. And that was counting Lieberman, for crying out loud!! So now we lament the loss of that -- and we act like it is catastrophe itself -- but we almost didn't have it to start with. And hardly did anyway with HolyJoe playing "catch me if you can."

So . . . what now?

3. This will be the real test of Obama's ability. Already he is changing strategy -- mostly evident in backing away from forcing through the very flawed health care reform and, at the same time, showing some real muscle in adopting Paul Volkner's push for greater banking regulation, which is the right thing to do and also begins to move away from the deplorable tilt toward the Wall Street groupthink of Geithner and Summers.

So . . . let's see. Maybe he can't walk on water, or turn water into wine. But maybe he can still perform the miracle of the loves and fishes -- where Jesus' human leadership got people to share their food, which in my humanist-revisionary interpretation, is what that "miracle" was all about.

Ralph