Leadership, Obama Style: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values (Drew Westen)

[freddie mertz]

Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator


Drew Westen
Psychologist and neuroscientist; Emory University Professor
Posted: December 20, 2009 09:34 PM

As the president's job performance numbers and ratings on his handling of virtually every domestic issue have fallen below 50 percent, the Democratic base has become demoralized, and Independents have gone from his source of strength to his Achilles Heel, it's time to reflect on why. The conventional wisdom from the White House is those "pesky leftists" -- those bloggers and Vermont Governors and Senators who keep wanting real health reform, real financial reform, immigration reform not preceded by a year or two of raids that leave children without parents, and all the other changes we were supposed to believe in.

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

(snip)

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.
(snip)

Consider the president's leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there's a conflict, because if there's a conflict, he doesn't want to be anywhere near it.

Health care is a paradigm case. When the president went to speak to the Democrats last week on Capitol Hill, he exhorted them to pass the bill. According to reports, though, he didn't mention the two issues in the way of doing that, the efforts of Senators like Ben Nelson to use this as an opportunity to turn back the clock on abortion by 25 years, and the efforts of conservative and industry-owned Democrats to eliminate any competition for the insurance companies that pay their campaign bills. He simply ignored both controversies and exhorted.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/leadership-obama-style-an_b_398813.html

[snagglepuss]

1. FYI this has already been posted.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7289115

[freddie mertz]

4. I missed it somehow.

Belongs in here anyway, it's about the president.

[snagglepuss]

6. It was just a heads up. Its a very insightful analysis.

:hi:

[freddie mertz]

9. Oh, OK. I did a search first, always do.

I also think its a useful piece.

[Better Believe It]

27. Not on this board. If you don't want people to see or read it just use your unrecommend feature!

However, I going to recommend it!

I don't unrecommend posts because that undemocratic.

[DrToast]

2. He's critical of Obama, but you guys should read him

Many of the techniques Westen suggested are what helped Obama get elected in the first place.

He's sort of like Frank Luntz, but not evil.

[freddie mertz]

3. Passive "leadership" style, avoidance of conflict, sounds like what Feingold

And Stinky Joe are describing today.

There seems to be some sort of weird vacuum at the top in the White House.

Could we have foreseen this?

[EFerrari]

5. Copenhagen is even clearer. He went there to exhort

(displace blame), made an opague, unenforceable, undemocratic "deal" that excluded the input of 80
% of the population of the planet and called it macaroni.

That was even more shocking to me than this health insurance flap because I pretty much knew the insurance industry was in charge here.

Things don't look great for the rebel alliance.

[phleshdef]

7. Meanwhile, in the flawed realities of the really, real world, the administration continues to...

...achieve the possible.

[Larkspur]

8. and pad the already oversize bank accounts of CEO's

The bank and health insurance CEO's are laughing at Obama and us all the way to their secluded mansions.

[phleshdef]

14. I just laugh at stupid cliche' BS like you just described.

Its a mark of lacking critical thought and originality.

[Larkspur]

17. I laugh at sheep like you

[phleshdef]

21. Sheep... see what I mean? You people aren't capable of an original thought are you?

[freddie mertz]

11. But nothing that resembles "change we can believe in."

That slogan is almost a mockery at this point.

[phleshdef]

12. If you can't see how different our course is compared to the prior 8 years, you are lying...

...to yourself just so you can feel like you were "right" all along. Thats all there is to it.

[freddie mertz]

15. I'm just telling like it is. No lie here.

And there are many who agree with me.

The ones with eyes to see.

[Name removed]

22. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[freddie mertz]

26. That's pure assholery on your part. You have no substance or evidence to offer.

So you resort to name-calling, as your cohort so often do.

[Larkspur]

Ask Don Siegleman if he's seen any of Obama's change

he hasn't so far. In fact the Bush DOJ people are still allowed to work on his case and put him in prison.

[depakid]

23. The difference is Bush was perceived to stand for something- and got policies through

that reflected what he purportedly stood for (even when they were unpopular- even profoundly so). Bush wasn't conflict averse- indeed, he was equally pathological on the other extreme. Yet you knew that you were either in for a fight- or would get steamrolled.

Obama on the other hand has a characteristic similar to Clinton: he wants everyone to "like him." He declines to make (or recognize) enemies (his own- and those of the public interest). Thus, he's been incapable of harnessing the public's anger, resentment and anxiety toward even the most demonstrable and hated of villains- health insurance parasites- declaring instead that "they're not bad people."

Trouble is- on the domestic front in particular- it's populist anger, resentment and anxiety that drives reform. Failure to use it results in failure to reign in abuses, and results in cynicism and excuse making- which is what we're seeing now.

Not a healthy trend- and a prescription for more losses down the line.

[freddie mertz]

28. Perhaps the goal is, in part, to divide us.

I have been thinking that today.

[QC]

30. Oh, please. You got to see pictures of him at the beach, with his shirt off!

Isn't that enough for you people?

[Vidar]

10. K&R.

[FrenchieCat]

13. This guy should do a piece about the fucked media and the gullible

Americans who believe what it reports.

I personally believe that is Obama's greatest problem,
not this other bullshit that this guy is writing about.

Whenever one is blamed for the perception folks have,
while those responsible for shaping that perception are left out of the equation,
you know the analysis is flawed.

[wndycty]

16. Plus 100,000

:kick:

[freddie mertz]

18. Do you think Feingold was lying?

You can't blame it all on the messenger.

A certain critical mass of evidence is emerging.

The history has yet to be written, but I we are beginning to sense the shape of it.

And it ain't pretty.

[FrenchieCat]

24. I tend to believe he has an opinion on the matter.

[freddie mertz]

25. Howard Dean has also commented on the WH's lack of "fight" on PO.

]Former DNC Chair Howard Dean, who has been a sharp critic of the compromises made to the Senate health care bill, said on Sunday that he was "disappointed" by the lack of fight from the White House -- specifically, the administration's abandonment of a public option.



There is VIDEO of him saying it HERE:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/20/howard-dean-disappointed_n_398505.html

So It's Russ, Howard, and Mr. Stinky.

They all agree.

Each from a different point of view.

Can you still deny this?

[ShortnFiery]

19. Not to mention, as we keep amping up the BOMBING within the ME arena, watch out for the BLOWBACK!

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/johnson

"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people.and repression to the Iranian people and elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution. The staff of the American embassy in Teheran was held hostage for more than a year. This misguided "covert operation" of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.

The pattern has become all too familiar. Osama bin Laden, the leading suspect as mastermind behind the carnage of September 11, is no more (or less) "evil" than his fellow creations of our CIA: Manuel Noriega, former commander of the Panama Defense Forces until George Bush père in late 1989 invaded his country and kidnapped him, or Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom we armed and backed so long as he was at war with Khomeini's Iran and whose people we have bombed and starved for a decade in an incompetent effort to get rid of him. These men were once listed as "assets" of our clandestine services organization.

Osama bin Laden joined our call for resistance to the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and accepted our military training and equipment along with countless other mujahedeen "freedom fighters." It was only after the Russians bombed Afghanistan back into the stone age and suffered a Vietnam-like defeat, and we turned our backs on the death and destruction we had helped cause, that he turned against us. The last straw as far as bin Laden was concerned was that, after the Gulf War, we based "infidel" American troops in Saudi Arabia to prop up its decadent, fiercely authoritarian regime. Ever since, bin Laden has been attempting to bring the things the CIA taught him home to the teachers. On September 11, he appears to have returned to his deadly project with a vengeance.

There are today, ten years after the demise of the Soviet Union, some 800 Defense Department installations located in other countries. The people of the United States make up perhaps 4 percent of the world's population but consume 40 percent of its resources. They exercise hegemony over the world directly through overwhelming military might and indirectly through secretive organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Though largely dominated by the US government, these are formally international organizations and therefore beyond Congressional oversight.

[depakid]

20. I was wondering when Westen would weigh in

and while he's palpably annoyed (if not angry) the larger points he makes on both substance and procedure are undeniable at this point. Conflict aversion, mixed messages, "stand for nothingness" -and now weakness through appeasement.

Obama, like so many Democrats in Congress, has fallen prey to the conventional Democratic strategic wisdom: that the way to win the center is to tack to the center.

But it doesn't work that way.

You want to win the center? Emanate strength. Emanate conviction. Lead like you know where you're going (and hopefully know what you're talking about).

People in the center will follow if you speak to their values, address their ambivalence (because by definition, on a wide range of issues, they're torn between the right and left), and act on what you believe. FDR did it. LBJ did it. Reagan did it. Even George W. Bush did it, although I wish he hadn't.

But you have to believe something.

I don't honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn't figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he's not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he's going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they're seeing right now is "liberalism," and they don't like what they see. I don't, either.

What's they're seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That's a recipe for going nowhere fast -- but getting there by November.

[freddie mertz]

29. Kicking because it's still relevant.

[WI_DEM]

31. usual nonsense. Presidents compromise to get things done. Obama's first year

compares favorably to most any other first year president in accomplishment.