This diary is related to Bobswern's diary on the rec list. I think the Elizabeth Drew's column is a must read for everyone, especially since there is the prevalent meme that all his deals were actually an effort to show how intransigent the GOP really is. Truthfully, this was no 11 dimension chess, this was bullet dodged, it was a whew moment.
Not long ago a video was released where Pres. Obama was lecturing a bunch of teens/tweens about lowering expectations, a marked departure from the candidate who campaigned on hope, and the promise that anything could be done. But the line that stuck out was this:
I think the College Republicans here would say I'm a pretty liberal President but if you read the Huffington Post you think I was some right wing tool of Wall Street. Both things can't be true.
I am of the opinion that both are true. Obama is way to the right of most of the progressive and Democratic grass-roots base, while the Republican base these days is so far to the right that they are teetering on the edge of insanity.
Whereas Elizabeth Drew talks about Obama's negotiation skills or the lack thereof, Bruce Bartlett recently posted a column in the Fiscal Times called "Barack Obama: The Democrats' Richard Nixon". I know that any comparison with Richard Nixon is odious, given the man's paranoia and abuse of power. However, Bartlett makes a very good analogy when it comes to economic policies.
And just as pent-up liberal aspirations exploded in the 1960s with spending for every pet project green lighted, so too the fiscal conservatism of the Clinton years led to an explosion of tax cuts under George W. Bush, who supported every one that came down the pike. The result was the same as it was with Johnson: massive federal deficits and a tanking economy.
Thus Obama took office under roughly the same political and economic circumstances that Nixon did in 1968 except in a mirror opposite way. Instead of being forced to manage a slew of new liberal spending programs, as Nixon did, Obama had to cope with a revenue structure that had been decimated by Republicans.
Liberals hoped that Obama would overturn conservative policies and launch a new era of government activism. Although Republicans routinely accuse him of being a socialist, an honest examination of his presidency must conclude that he has in fact been moderately conservative to exactly the same degree that Nixon was moderately liberal.
Bartlett has been a steadfast critic of modern day conservatives and their penchant to rewrite economic history. So in that regard his column makes a great reading.