President Obama still represents Change I believe in

This morning, Drew Weston, Emory University Professor and a psychologist and neuroscientist posted a thoughtful article: Change We Can Believe In: Feelings Toward the Administration by Those Who Elected It . It articulates emerging concerns he has as well as concerns he heard from other Obama supporters.

I’m still completely confident in Obama, not as a miracle worker but as an intelligent and decent human being, confronted by an overwhelming set of challenges and working with the tools he has to resolve them. Having been a hi-tech CEO, my own expectations have been more realistic than Prof. Weston’s and those of many other Obama supporters, and I have a sense of strategy and tactics honed by years of experience and a youthful passion for the game of Chess. Obama understands strategy; the last administration was all reactive tactics (I don’t say this lightly, Bush lacked the intellectual capacity and training for any strategic thinking whatsoever; that’s tragic in any leader of a Democracy.).

Obama inherited four huge challenges: the deficit, the war, the economic crisis and health care reform. He has kicked the can down the road on the first three. Whereas he seems to have made excellent choices for Secretaries of Defense and State, Larry Summers was an understandable mistake as chief economic advisor and Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary, reasonable tactical choices because they understood and could hit the ground running on the immediate crises, but strategic blunders because of their relatively narrow visions and tribal connections to Wall Street.  See my earlier post How Tribalism has undermined Wall Street Reforms. Those who accuse Obama of sellout on the economic issues have no idea how difficult it is to find strategic thinkers on economic issues. They may not exist (another comment I don’t make lightly).

Obama has chosen to focus on achieving health care reform this year within a clear strategic objective: affordable, excellent health care for all citizens. Within his overall strategy he seems to be performing astute tactical maneuvers, some of which fall (like deals with Pharma) under the heading of “divide and conquer.”  Remember, politics is the art of compromise, the achievement of the practical with the people in place. Washington is a thoroughly compromised political machine, partly because we moderates have chosen to vote, and then sit back between elections criticizing while moneyed interests and extremists dictated legislation and paid for re-election campaigns. Obama, our elected general, must execute using us, who are untrained in applying political pressure and a corrupted management team (Congress). The wise general is realistic about his resources, picks his battles and tries to neutralize those he can, inside and outside, pickup allies wherever possible, achieve a major objective then goes back later and cleans up unfinished business.

Obama has made mistakes, will make them in the future, will fail to achieve many objectives and will have to compromise on others just to get the most important things accomplished. As my mother-in-law used to say: “Angels could do no more” without undermining our Democracy. So, let’s get realistic in our support and help Obama achieve realistic goals within the democratic process.  

Extremists would rather fail than compromise; as daily demonstrated by right wing Republicans.