Drew Westen: "Leadership is a quality Barack Obama . . . has failed to show as president"

How serious is the administration about reforming

the bad old ways of the financial services industry?

"Genuine leadership means setting the agenda. It means taking tough stands. It means telling people the truth forcefully and evocatively in a way that makes them want to listen and act. It means drawing lines in the sand when you must, and refusing to compromise your values even if you have to compromise on some of the policies born of those values when you have no other choice. It means fighting for what you believe in and taking on powerful vested interests when people's lives and livelihoods are at stake. And it means looking backward at the past so you don't make the same mistakes, looking sideways at alternatives so you know your options, and using that vision to move the nation forward.

"Leadership is a quality Barack Obama showed on the campaign trail. It is a quality he has failed to show as president."

-- Drew Westen, in "Leadership, Obama Style,"

on HuffPost yesterday

by Ken

All of a sudden we're in "Year One Retrospective Mode" for the Obama administration -- a bit prematurely, it seems to me, since what we're commemorating now is the anniversary of the election rather than the inauguration. It's fair to say that Howie and I haven't been exactly consistent cheerleaders, voicing not only serious disagreements with the administration but dark forebodings about its intentions.

I can certainly appreciate the "world of change in 287 days" the Washiington Post's Gene Robinson writes about, noting that for all his quibbles and quarrels with some of the president's actions, "he's a president, not a Hollywood action hero." And I certainly identify with the mixed feelings of OpenLeft's Mike Lux, who for all his reservations, often deep, concludes we have to pull together and work as best we can with the Obama team, 'cause they are, after all, what we've got. I'm certainly on board with Mike's conclusion:

I am looking for big, deep, transformative, history making change, and am looking for an administration eager to work with the progressive movement to help make that happen. My optimistic side sees the good things that have happened, and appreciates them. I remind myself that it took Lincoln almost two years to free the slaves, and it took FDR more than two years to pass Social Security- even in big change eras, it doesn't always happen immediately. But it's only a year until the next election, and if we don't start delivering real change and real results- tangible results- for the American people soon on jobs and health care and other big issues, we won't have a chance for bigger changes in 2011.

Barack Obama raised our expectations through the roof with his stirring campaign. He needs to deliver change we can believe in. He needs to convince us that "yes, we can" is more than a political slogan. He needs to take seriously the history of struggle he is always talking about, and create the same kind of big transformative change that Lincoln and TR and FDR and LBJ did.

I feel even closer to the Young Turks' Cenk Uygur, who like me is still trying to figure out what this Obama fellow's intentions are.

If he's the guy who got us all excited that anyone could become president, that anything was possible, that real change was coming and the one that was going to stop the same old power players in Washington from controlling everything to the detriment of the people, then we're in great shape. That means he is one of us.

You can question his tactics, but as long as he has the right goals and the right agenda, we'll be fine. We're all hoping (with the audacity of hope, I suppose) that he's the master chess player who is carefully finding ways to play the system but in the end will do the right thing.

I don't even mind if he tries but fails. As long as he is pushing for us, working for us and wants to actually challenge the status quo (the central message of his campaign). Even if we fail in the short term, if we all fight together and we have the president on our side, we will ultimately prevail.

What I do mind is if he is not that guy. If he just played us to get elected and will give us just enough change to placate the masses but leave the system completely intact. That's the kind of guy who would push for a trigger for the public option and pretend he actually gave you the public option. It's not about the trigger, it's not about the public option it's not even about health care reform -- it's what it says about him. Is he playing the politicians and lobbyists in Washington or is he playing us?

The rumination that really grabbed me, though, is Drew Westen's, which I cited at the top. What he's focusing on, as the quote up top suggests, is the quality of the president's leadership, in particular as contrasted with the kind he showed as a presidential candidate.

Sure, we won't know the outcomes of many of his decisions for years. We won't know, for example, if the health care reform bill he ultimately signs really turns out to be "budget-neutral" ten years from now. But we can see how he let its budget-neutrality become the central theme of the debate and the way he has tacitly or explicitly supported, or failed to support, different aspects of that legislation, including ways of paying for it that either do or don't come out of the pockets of working and middle class Americans -- the same people who are just seeing their health care premiums raised by a third in anticipation by the health insurance companies. And in that sense, I think we have seen the clear outlines of Obama's approach to leadership.

And his conclusion about the president's presidential leadership, again, is not favorable: ""Leadership is a quality Barack Obama showed on the campaign trail. It is a quality he has failed to show as president."

Leadership is not about saying, "me, too." It is not about waiting until Congress finally passes a hate crimes bill that makes slaughtering a gay kid a real crime, or waiting for Congress to end don't-ask/don't tell -- when even the vast majority of the public is for it -- and then pulling out your special "me, too" pen for the signing ceremony. Leadership is not making public pronouncements that simultaneously support and undercut the goal of requiring the health insurance industry to compete with at least one plan they don't control.

The health care debate is a prototypical example. Obama could have told members of Congress when the health care fight began, "If the average American doesn't have the same quality and range of options at the end of this process that you do, I will not sign any appropriations bill for next year that includes health insurance for federal employees, your family and mine included, because if it's good enough for us, it's good enough for the people we serve." Had the president done that, he would have had populist sentiment at his back, not with its back up against Democrats over "death panels." Blue Dogs and conservative Democrats would have been champions of populist reform, both because it would have been in the interest of their own family's health and because it would have struck a resonant chord with their constituents. All it would have taken was a sharp condemnation of the health insurance industry -- something he ultimately ended up having to do anyway after they decided his plan was no longer in their interest -- and what has led to a recent shift in the Democrats' favor on health care reform.

Westen credits the president with "set[ting] a national agenda, and an ambitious one at that," and with "[speaking] to the world in a way that has restored their faith in America, at least for now." But he suggests:

It would be nice to see from the president a little less Rodney King -- "Why can't we all get along?" -- and a little more Martin Luther King, who wasn't interested in compromising on 3/5 of a man or 3/5 of a vote -- and who wouldn't have sat on the sidelines waiting to declare victory upon insuring 3/5 of the people who can't afford health insurance. When the Senate sent its fifth and final health care bill out committee, the president lavished praise on one person -- Republican Senator Olympia Snow, apparently for failing to obstruct the process -- who promptly noted that her support was only temporary. The president's highest-level surrogates then fanned out on the Sunday morning shows to demonstrate his staunch commitment to equivocation on whether the health insurance industry needs some healthy competition to bring costs down and guarantee high quality, affordable care.

This, in microcosm, is the essence of the President's approach to leadership -- Obamaprise -- the art of compromising when you don't have to. The goal is not to get the best possible bill, to fulfill his campaign pledges to the people who elected him, or to fulfill values to which he is deeply committed, whatever they seem to be when the dust settles on his latest moving speech. The goal is to find someone with whom to compromise, whether it's the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, or Senate Republicans on health care; the energy industry and the "clean coal" lobby on climate change; or the banks lavishing their latest set of outrageous bonuses on their executives for another Heckuva-Job-Bernanke year.

He offers some counter-examples of real leadership:

Leadership is not searching for the golden mean between what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false, what the Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress and the people who elected them to run the country believe after eight dismal years of Bush Republicanism and what Chuck Grassley or Olympia Snowe finds aesthetically or financially appealing.

We were lucky Abraham Lincoln did not invite Jefferson Davis into his cabinet to insure that he had a "team of rivals."

We were lucky FDR famously "welcomed the hatred" of those who had plunged the nation into the Great Depression because that freed him to regulate them.

We were lucky Lyndon Johnson did not let the knowledge that he was handing the South to the Republicans for at least a generation by signing the Civil Rights Acts deter him from the dictates of his uncompromised conscience.

And he concludes:

President Obama needs to reflect on whatever is driving his compromised approach to leadership. He will no doubt accomplish many good things in his four or eight years in office, in part because there is so much damage from the preceding administration to undo, and with a Republican Party in complete disarray, he will no doubt accomplish incremental change we can believe in if that's really what he wants to take to the voters in 2012.

But if he does not change course, he is on the path to being known as the first black president -- nothing more, nothing less -- a solid caretaker on the order of Dwight Eisenhower, who tinkered around the edges of the ideology of the last visionary president, FDR, the way Obama is tinkering around the edges of the last game-changing president, Ronald Reagan.

With his extraordinary intellect and his ability to speak to people's hopes and aspirations, this president has the capacity to be the transformative leader we all thought we were electing. But if he wants to be known for giving eloquent speeches followed up by field goals where he could have had touchdowns, he is well on his way to the thirty yard line.

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