[lbo-talk] Why Obama doesn't suck

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Wed Nov 10 20:40:08 PST 2010


On 11/10/2010 10:54 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:


> I think SA and Marv probably agree that Obama would have been way less lame
> if his constituents hadn't left it to Obama and Congress to get done what
> needed (from and "bourgeois politician with gumption" perspective) to be
> done.

I think you're right, we do agree on that.


> I don't think, however, that this explains why the Obama Admin didn't take
> someone from the press and said: "You want to see a Death Panel? We're
> standing outside the offices of the insurance company that wrongly denied
> little 8-year old Bobby Sue the treatment she need and killed her. If the
> Republicans and Tea Partiers have their way, these Death Panels will
> continue to have their way. In our plan, on the other hand, these kinds of
> decisions will be legislatively illegal."

First of all, for a sitting president to personally target a particular company like that would be the nuclear option.

I'd suggest you haven't gamed this out. Obama calculated from the start that, while he could pass his reform, he could only do so if the main lobbies held their fire and didn't bombard the airwaves with negative ads and a full-court press. Given the razor-thin legislative victory, he was probably right about that. (During the health debate, the pro-reform insurance companies paid for millions in pro-reform ads in Blue Dog districts to battle the anti-reform factions.) It's hard to picture that alliance surviving a stunt like the one you're proposing.


> It is interesting that SA is critical of Marv's use of polls in order to
> defend his use of a poll

I was critical of Marv's use of an *issues* poll to tell us what kind of *tactics* the Dem base would support. My use of a tactics poll doesn't suffer from that problem.


> the circumstances within which
> the poll was taken and the history of the political discourses of the two
> parties are bracketed in each case. Of course Republicans are taking a no
> prisoners attitude at the moment, it's just won them a boatload of
> governorships, House Seats and Senate seats, not to mention state
> legislatures.

That's a good point.

I just looked for a similar poll from after the 2008 election. Here's what I found:

NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll. April 23-26, 2009. N=1,005 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.1.

"When it comes to how President Obama has dealt with the Republicans in Congress, would you say that he has been too stubborn, too willing to compromise, or that he has struck the right balance?"

Pollingreport.com doesn't give the partisan breakdown. But only 14% of respondents said Obama had been too willing to compromise while 25% thought he was too stubborn. So once again you have roughly twice as many people thinking Obama's too stubborn as thinking he's too soft.

SA



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