Obama Mandate: Post-Partisanship

On Election Day, Barack Obama canceled a fireworks display for the Grant Park rally that night, a sign he wants to leave the long campaign behind and start governing, something the Bush-Cheney-Rove Administration neglected to do for eight years.

Governing, but how? Tuesday's victory margins clearly were a mandate to change the bitter two-year stalemate of tenuous Congressional control by Democrats and a stubborn, veto-wielding White House.

"Obama's ability," Dan Balz notes in the Washington Post, "to manage relationships with Democratic congressional leaders, with Republicans and with impatient liberal constituencies with agendas of their own will have a lasting impact on his presidency. Can he, for example, fulfill his promise to govern in a unifying and inclusive way yet also push an ambitious progressive agenda?"

That may be the wrong question. "Ambitious progressive agenda" still sees the American crisis through the left-right lens of eight years that led to abysmal approval ratings and voter revolt against Washington politics.

In the afterglow of his historic breakthrough, the President-Elect has an opportunity to test his consensus approach to governing by bringing the decimated Republican opposition into a process that goes beyond scoring political points for the next election cycle and attacks problems in some semblance of bipartisanship.

He has the chance to demonstrate the difference between consensus and caution by showing that leadership can go beyond "agendas" and begin to find solutions.

If that sounds naïve, so be it. Obama has rehearsed overcoming that charge in two tough years of campaigning. Let's see what he can do with it in the real world.

The Experience a President Needs

Democrats will surely nominate a senator, and if John McCain can't go all the way, Republicans will name a former governor or super-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who insists that a president needs executive experience to run the Executive branch.

History suggests otherwise. In 1960, Richard Nixon used that argument against John F. Kennedy and, in the early months of JFK's Administration, it looked like Nixon might have had a point as the new President mishandled the Bay of Pigs disaster.

But Kennedy trumped his inexperience with two crucial qualities: He took responsibility for his mistakes and learned from them, in contrast to George W. Bush, whose resume as an executive did not help him do either, and Nixon who... But you know the rest of that story.

Instinctively Kennedy surrounded himself with the best people ("You can't beat brains," he would say) and insisted on hearing all sides of an argument before he made a decision, as he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Those qualities would satisfy even Giuliani, who wrote a book about leadership but has had trouble practicing his own principles, as his Bernard Kerik albatross and the bitter 9/11 complaints of New York fire fighters suggest.

For a President Obama or McCain, the first days in the Oval would not be a test of management skills. What will count is their vision for America and determination to translate it into political reality. Voters are instinctively doing the right thing by focusing on that.

Gut Check Time for Democrats

The party that could win the White House and extend its majorities in both houses of Congress next year is in disarray.

In confronting a President with abysmal approval ratings, Democrats have managed to lose every major battle this year--over the war in Iraq, children's health insurance and illegal wiretapping--and dissipate the mandate that gave them legislative control last November.

Now the internal bickering is on. Today a sappy memo from a House aide blames it on semantics. "Why,” writes Dave Helfert, who now works for Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii). “are we defending S-CHIP instead of advocating a ‘Healthy Kids’ plan?...Republicans have been kicking our rhetorical butt since about 1995.”

But imitating Frank Luntz won't solve the party's problems. True enough, as a new book "The Political Brain" argues, Democrats may be too cerebral instead of going for the gut. But their real problem is not language but leadership.

On the surface, Bush's intransigence and their narrow margins in both houses have tied their hands, but no more so than the failure of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to get beyond playing it politically safe.

Their approach to S-CHIP is symptomatic. Yesterday they passed another bill that inches toward the White House position with an Oliver Twist-like, "Please, sir, we want some more."

As for slowing the war in Iraq or stopping a new one against Iran, they have not only given up trying but talking as well. On the overriding issue of our time, Democrats have been cowed by accusations of "not supporting the troops" if they block funding. It's past time for someone to step up and rally them to try.

There are signs that something is stirring. Chris Dodd is threatening a Senate filibuster of FISA bill provisions to grant telecoms retroactive immunity for helping Bush-Cheney spy on Americans, and other '08 candidates may join him. Not exactly "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," but it could be a start.

What's the point of winning it all in '08 if Democrats don't show the will and courage to change course between now and then?

Too Much News: Deprivation by Surfeit

A book I once wrote argued we were being stuffed with information but starved for understanding. David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker have just spent two days making the point with a ribbon on it.

After all the graphs, statistics, anecdotes and guarded generalizations, they did not, could not answer the only questions that matter: When will this war end, and is it making us any safer from terrorism?

Two of our best and brightest public servants responded with the classic waiter’s shrug, “That’s not my table.”

In the last century, social critic Lewis Mumford pointed out that, although science and technology assume constantly increasing consumption of goods and knowledge is desirable, it can lead to “deprivation by surfeit.”

With concentration on speed and productivity, Mumford wrote, “we have ignored the need for evaluation, correction, selection and social assimilation.”

Today’s journalism and politics validate his theory as clearly as do the clogging of our highways and the overwhelming of air-traffic control. We are in a hurry to get somewhere without being sure of the destination and how to get there without falling over one another.

Sorting it all out used to be called leadership, but that is the only product in short supply.