Lacking Power

There is a sentence in Gwen Ifill’s Washington Post review of David Remnick’s new biography of Barack Obama which if true and if, as many expect, the Democratic Party loses control of one or more of the houses of Congress in November, suggests it could be the best thing that ever happened to the Obama presidency short of his election itself:

Lacking power, Obama is shown to be the ultimate pragmatist. If he can’t be in control, he is ready to move on. Remnick mentions frequently how easily Obama can get bored. He was bored at Occidental, the first college he attended; bored at the University of Chicago, where as a teacher he focused on writing his first book; bored in the Illinois Senate; and even bored in the U.S. Senate, where he was more interested in writing his second book.

10 comments… add one
  • I’ve done the math several times and I do not see how the GOP can possibly gain back either House. Gain seats, yes. Gain enough seats? I don’t see how it’s possible. There just aren’t enough seats that are realistically in serious contention, and the Republicans are consistently polling worse than the Democrats in the generic polls, meaning that any upsets should be pretty thin on the ground.

    The GOP strategy appears to be to simply put their faith into bad economic numbers and coast to victory, without noticing that their poll numbers are terrible.

  • Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball is currently calling for the Republicans to pick up 7 seats in the Senate. That’s enough to get control of the Senate (because of the two independents).

    Note that I am not lauding this possibility, merely pointing it out. I’m pretty fed up with both Congressional Democrats and Republicans.

  • Michael Reynolds Link

    Now Obama is “shown to be the ultimate pragmatist?” I’ve been saying that from the start. He’s moderate, pragmatic, non-ideological and ruthless in the best sense of that word — he never loses focus.

    The “easily bored” line is asinine. Our easily bored president has thus far done precisely what he said he would do — double down on Afghanistan, stick to the Iraq timetable and pass healthcare reform. He accomplished with HCR what no president has managed to do. He’s now moving on to the rest of his agenda with no sign of being “bored.”

    I think what baffles analysts is that Obama is exactly what he seems to be and exactly what he says he is. Evidently that’s confusing. When the punditocracy has him labeled as everything from weak, vacillating and naive to Stalinist and Hitlerian, you have an intellectual disconnect in the chattering class. It’s blind men describing an elephant.

    I’ll repeat exactly what I said back during the election: he’s extremely smart, he’s ruthless, he doesn’t scare, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about re-election, he doesn’t have an ideological bone in his body, he’s pragmatic, and he plays a very long and patient game.

    On the downside he doesn’t give people what they want emotionally, he doesn’t connect, he doesn’t understand that voters are clueless, credulous, emotional and irrational. Bill Clinton was the master of emotional resonance, as was Reagan before him. If Obama is like any recent president he’s probably closest to George H.W. Bush but without the neediness.

    Obama is, as someone said, our first Vulcan president. Coming off our recent impetuous, swaggering, blustering Captain Kirk president it’s a shock of cold water.

  • PD Shaw Link

    Doesn’t a seven seat pickup make it D (50), R (48), I (2)? It seems to me that the Republicans need an eight or nine seat pick-up given Biden’s tie vote cast, depending on whether the Republicans can get Lieberman to caucus with them.

    I think the Illinois Senate seat is probably (55% chance) going to go Republican after the Blagojevitch trial and some of the bank issues surrounding the Democratic candidate. I believe that would make it 8.

  • PD Shaw Link

    michael, the piece argues that he’s bored when he lacks power. When he was a backbencher in private law practice, in the Illinois Senate and the U.S. Senate he seemed to quickly become interested in finding some other job. I don’t know what “moving on” from the Presidency means in this context, and he certainly won’t have a lack of power even if the Republicans control Congress.

  • sam Link

    Along these lines, see Frank Rich’s column, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Obama!:

    Depending on where you stand — or the given day — [Obama] is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela.

    Who the hell is this guy?

  • PD Shaw Link

    obviously he’s one of the Boys from Brazil. The dates even check out. The book takes place in 1974, when the Hitler clones are 13 years old. Obama was born in 1961.

  • Michael Reynolds Link

    PD:

    My theory is that “bored when lacking power” is the definition of the male point of view. I don’t know if you’re married, but if you are I suspect you’ve had the conversation that goes roughly like this:

    Wife: I feel, she thinks, we all wonder, then she said, so I suspect, so I’m worried that she thinks I feel . . . and on for some considerable time.

    Husband: So . . . What do you want me to do?

    Men confronted by an inability to formulate specific action generally lose interest. The very concept of attentive, involved impotence — Discussions involving in-laws, playing ‘guess the unintentional offense,’ Senate hearings and the like — is antithetical to our natures. In many instances the only useful action we can come up with is opening a beer bottle.

  • I don’t think the Democrats will lose 7 Senate seats. Looking at some of the GOP primary candidates (not to mention the mess in Nevada), I think that the incumbent machine is going to pull some of those out for the Democrats.

  • Wife: I feel, she thinks, we all wonder, then she said, so I suspect, so I’m worried that she thinks I feel . . . and on for some considerable time.

    Husband: So . . . What do you want me to do?

    QFT.

    Men confronted by an inability to formulate specific action generally lose interest. The very concept of attentive, involved impotence — Discussions involving in-laws, playing ‘guess the unintentional offense,’ Senate hearings and the like — is antithetical to our natures. In many instances the only useful action we can come up with is opening a beer bottle.

    Again, QFT.

    Thanks for the chuckle Micheal.

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