Egan in NYT: Obama's style and need for Big Idea

[MBS]

I thought this oped was astute
(and, given the coordinated messages of John Kerry, Pres Obama and Chu on need for "Sputnik moment" push on alternate energy and rebuilding infrastructure, I think he's finally, in the eleventh hour -- no, make that 11:50-- on his way to articulating that Big Idea). A Talking Head this past week offered the opinion that the American people would accept the need to sacrifice if they could see that it was for a larger cause. .

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/a-big-idea/?hp

In Twitter-speak, the advice to President Obama from his disheartened liberal base is to bulk up on the political equivalent of steroids, something to make this most cerebral of presidents more ripped and less reserved. . . . Not. Gonna. Happen. One of the most revealing film clips from Obama’s past shows him at school when he became the first black president of a fractious Harvard Law Review. Young Obama, the college-age compromiser, looks eerily like middle-age Obama trying to be bipartisan at midterm. And there he was on Monday, giving in to tax cuts for all in return for a few favors for the middle class.

. . . .

But if he can’t change his personal nature, he can change the master narrative of his presidency. To do that, he needs a Big Idea. One of the mystifying paradoxes of Obama is how this gifted writer, this eloquent communicator, has not been able to come up with a simple, overarching governing frame.
. . . .

He hit a few good notes on Monday in his speech to college students in North Carolina. Evoking American motivation to greatness after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik in 1957, Obama said, “Our generation’s Sputnik moment is next.” What’s needed, he said, is “to do what Americans have always been known for: building, innovating, making things.”The words, the sentiment, the right impulses are all there in the White House. It’s up to the writer-president to put them together.

Speaking for myself, alternate energy, public transportation, and rebuilding infrastructure is a cause (are causes) I could really get behind. And the implication that Sec. of Energy Chu and Sen. Kerry, who both have been on these issues for decades, might be somehow involved in pushing this along is reassuring to me.