Why the President Is Losing on Health Care by Drew Westen

[Paranoid Pessimist]

Why the President Is Losing on Health Care and What He Needs to Say by Drew Westen

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/why-the-president-has-bee_b_278971.html

". . . compare Obama and Franklin Roosevelt at a similar juncture in our history. Roosevelt was genuinely outraged at the entrenched interests that had mass-produced misery and unemployment in his country, and he channeled the legitimate anger and fear of the American people to galvanize support for his New Deal. He made no bones about who had caused the Great Depression and who was trying to block legislation that might get us out of it. And he made no bones about the fact that if the private sector was going to lay off employees at a record pace, the federal government was going to put them right back to work building an infrastructure the country needed in the long run and give laid-off manufacturing workers a badly needed salary for a hard day's work until the private sector could get its act together again. You could make a pretty good case that this is precisely what Obama should have done (and still could do) instead of converting hundreds of billions of stimulus funds into Republican tax cuts, ultimately contributing to the mass layoffs of state and local employees we are now seeing that are undercutting the economic recovery and creating new unemployment when we should be creating new employment.

"But Obama, unlike FDR, just can't seem to get himself worked up enough to experience or express anger when it's appropriate. He looks more like Michael Dukakis when posed with that hypothetical question about his wife being raped and murdered (to which he responded, to borrow Bill Maher's apt paraphrase, 'Whatever')."

I have 2 theories about why this is true. Both or one or the other or neither may be true, but ...

1) Obama is terrified of appearing as an "angry black man."

2) When Obama assumed the presidency, someone sat him down and said the same thing they said to Bill Clinton: "Forget all that stuff you said during the campaign, here's what you can and cannot really do and here are the consequences of going off message."

[salguine]

1. Obama suffers from the same Achilles' heel that Bill Clinton had—namely, he seems to feel

an overwhelming need to be liked by everybody. And what we really need is somebody who'll do what has to be done, even if it pisses off some people.

[whistler162]

2. And in other news Fred T Snodgrass says

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