Obama, Searching for a Vision

[WestVirginiaRebel]

NY Times:

WASHINGTON — When President Obama emerged from spending talks last Thursday night, he went before cameras to insist that an agreement was needed to avoid a government shutdown that he warned would damage the country. What he did not do was make a public case for what should be in the agreement itself.

During a week of budget brinkmanship, the president who signed the largest stimulus spending program in American history largely left it to his Senate allies to respond to the sharp clarity of the Republican austerity message rather than outline a clear vision of what the role of government should be in the era of the Tea Party and rocketing national debt.

His reserved approach came at a time when he is being pressed as never before to define what American liberalism means for the 21st century. In the same week he kicked off his re-election campaign, he suggested that the incumbent of 2012 will not be the same as the candidate of 2008, as he pivoted on counterterrorism policy, embraced another free trade pact and managed his own military intervention in the Middle East. And yet he seemed reluctant to be drawn out too much as he confronted challenges that were never part of his original agenda.

“How does he define himself against this wave of conservative rhetoric and ideology?” asked Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “It’s hard for him to say I’m an old-fashioned New Deal, Great Society liberal. He can’t say that and expect to win reelection. So you fudge. It’s like what they said about Roosevelt being a chameleon on plaid, changing coloration and shifting forms. But it’s much more difficult now because of the 24/7 news cycle.”

In the days leading up to a last-minute deal Friday night averting a government shutdown, the president’s immediate tactical goal seemed to be holding himself out as the one reasonable man in an unreasonable town. While the rest of Washington squabbled, he presented himself as the grown-up above a messy fray that would alienate voters scratching their heads over how the government almost could not get its act together to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

The effect, though, was to obscure his own philosophy and to raise the question of what he wants a second term for. “He needs to be very careful to avoid leaving voters with the impression that his sphinx-like aloofness is all that liberalism has to offer,” said Yuval Levin, a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and a former domestic policy aide to President George W. Bush.
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The awesomeness continues to wear thin.