Bold Leadership

A different point about Obama’s legislative record: forget the debate over whether “Obama has substance” (he has, but a lot of his supporters couldn’t tell you what it is) for a moment, and consider what his most notable achievements are.  For the great Unifier, he has done most of his successful bipartisan work on things that are fairly uncontroversial (ethics reform, securing loose Russian nukes).  On anything contentious, Obama has not shown much facility for “bringing people together,” because he knows that these issues are contentious because people have genuine, perhaps even principled, disagreements over them, and he has many of the same disagreements as his most liberal colleagues.  The lie behind the bipartisanship obsession is that there is a supposed lack of bipartisanship because of some failure of leadership or imagination, when, in fact, bipartisanship is lacking because of fundamental differences over certain questions.  When it is a procedural reform or a blindingly obvious national security issue, bipartisanship is easy because no one really disagrees or has strong opposition to the measure, and when it isn’t easy because there is actual political risk in crossing the aisle Obama is nowhere to be found.   

As others have said, by Obama’s own standard, Obama fails.