Still Waiting for an Obama-Beohner Leadership Moment
We need it and it is long overdue.  We will survive without it, but isn't this what we elect representatives to do?  It is not an outrageous expectation:  sit down and figure this out together.  The most recent efforts, while better than nothing, are not leadership unless these are a prelude to using the extra time bought to get it done.  Speaker Beohner has a very tough job, true.  But that is why we value leadership and why great leaders become heroes...they tackle the tough jobs.

 

David Ignatius points to the president as leadership-failure-in-chief, and not without good reason.  While it is still possible that a grand bargain will emerge, the most recent hot potato approach to our fiscal health as a nation is as disappointing as Ignatius argues.  President Obama may have missed an opportunity.

‘Obama had seemed poised a few weeks ago to become at last the political leader the country needs. He won a brilliant election victory, using political tools so sophisticated that Republican strategists have been trying ever since to “reverse engineer” them so they can avoid humiliating defeats. Obama spoke to the nation after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in a voice that was truly presidential in its restrained expression of deep grief. In short, Obama seemed ready to lead.

And then what happened? In his December fiscal cliff negotiations with the GOP, Obama repeated many of the mistakes he made earlier in his first term. Rather than come to the table with a grand vision of his own — a real strategy for cutting the deficit and the entitlement programs that drive it — he played a poker game of incremental bargaining with House Speaker John Boehner. This was an unwise approach even before Boehner demonstrated his incompetence by failing to pass his “Plan B” alternative through the GOP-controlled House.’

At the same time, as Ruth Marcus points out, the president was not in this alone.  And while the president is not without responsibility, in politics leadership toward the unachievable benefits no one.  As Marcus, who is also critical of the president, reminds us, the House Republicans have now twice rejected grand bargains that Obama and Beohner have negotiated…and it is precisely this sort of grand bargain that Ignatius is rightly calling for from our leadership.

“Whose fault is this? You could lament a failure of presidential leadership. Where was the cliff during the campaign? What was the president’s plan — not just eliminating tax cuts for the wealthy but reforming entitlements as well?

Still, the ultimate blame lies with the House Republican caucus, which spurned two deals (the collapsed Obama-Boehner plan during the debt-ceiling fight in 2011, and the collapsed Obama-Boehner plan to avoid the cliff) that were far better, from the point of view of debt reduction, than what ended up passing.

The most effective communicator wielding the bulliest of pulpits could not prevail with a crowd this entrenched in anti-tax craziness.”