It was exactly one year ago today that Americans rose up in unison and did the unexpected, they put a 'nigger' in their White House! Millions of Americans who, believing in the 'Hope and Change' themed campaign of then candidate Barack Obama, trooped out enmass to give him the much needed tail-wind that pushed him into the presidency. Their only motivation, a young, ebullient and eloquent African-American with an exotic sounding name, who talks like someone well intentioned to carry out what was promised this time around? However, one year down the road, people are beginning to wonder aloud whether they gambled wisely or got a lemon in the bargain? Icheoku says, President Barack Obama will only have himself to blame if he fleets away the goodwill of the American people that propelled him into the White House. His Democratic Party has controlling majority in both House of Representatives and the Senate and no one can ask for anything more to perform? The president's handicap is that he seems to defer so much to so many people, who he considers his political senior or who he feels somewhat somehow indebted to? Icheoku says, President Barack Obama, you do not owe anybody anything as the American people unconditionally voted for what you represented; and will not buy into any contrary argument for any possible failure or your none performance. The president have no reason not to deliver on his mandate and must be prepared to break some legs if need be, just to deliver on the 'Change We Can Believe In' as the American people cannot 'HOPE' forever. It is called having a 'BACKBONE' and if it means firing your present chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, or any under-perfoming member of your cabinet, so be it; but you must not fail or disappoint the many millions of Americans who hope and trust in you to bring the change they can believe in. The American people are aware that efforts are being made by your government to fix the economy; but a jobless man cannot appreciate economic jargons until he can secure a job? A popular saying goes "show me the money!" Tangibles speaks more volumne than intangible projections and this is why it appears that your government is sleeping on the wheels of governance? Since these jobs are taking time to come and not materialising soon enough, may be you should adjust your strategy and focus on other areas that could easily translate to more visible and tangible results. Just order Guantanamo prison closed and let Americans see the gates shuttered forever? That is an example of a tangible achievement that journalists could fly down there to confirm that at last, President Obama had performed as promised with the closing of the terrorists vacation home in Cuba? Any terrorist that his home country cannot or refuses to take back should be flown to that country in the middle of the night and dropped off somewhere in the country to find his way. Just like the CIA infamous rendition; but this time a reversed rendition. if such marked terrorist is ever found again or captured in any battle field anywhere, let the operatives summarily deal with him. On Iraq, you can order the troops home now and let Americans watch their military start to bring their troops and equipment home; drastically reduce the stationed troop in Iraq to under 100,000 and do it now for effect. On Afghanistan, give General McCrystal his needed 40,000 troops and let him be the fall guy on that front; and in any event that mission fails or did not succeeded as envisaged, you can always blame that on the military since you gave them all they demanded and you cannot personally go down to the trenches yourself?
On the proposed missile shield base in Poland that is now scrapped on your orders, may be such was conceded without anything in return? The Iranian nuclear malady would have been extracted from the Russians as what the have to pay to play, before the final announcement scrapping the proposed missile shielf? It is called quid pro quo, trade off; what I get for what I give? May be some firm ultimatum could be given to the Iranians to behave or have some bombs dropped on those Natanz sites? Or the North Koreans could be told in a firm unequivocating terms that enough is enough with their bullshiting the world? Whatever it is , just do something that American people can visualize as your government doing something with the mandate they gave to you on November 4, 2008. Also, consider hiring someone like James Carville and give him the full authority to play the role of an attack dog for your government since your well-intended pacifist Washington seems not to have been well received by the other side. It is about time trenches are dug for the shooting-war for the hearts and minds of the American people to really begin? Shake up something, talk tougher, make threats, issue ultimatums and drop some bombs somewhere if you must; but let us see some movement from your government. If the health care reform is not working, summon the party officials and let them know what you promised the American people and the loss of face its failure will bring on everyone. Just do something?
You should also remember that you have no co-presidency with anybody, not Hillary Clinton, not Joe Biden, not anybody; the buck stops squarely on your desk. If you need to fire anybody, just do that but let the engines of your administration start to roll. Our greatest fear is that if this trend of appearing to be 'doing nothing' continues, President Barack Obama might regrettably, be another President Jimmy Carter waiting to happen, a one term president? But he still have the benefit of three more years to prove he can do what he promised the American people: - fulfil their hopes and bring about the change the can believed in, which motivated them to troop out exactly one year ago today to put you in the White House! Failure to fire up the engine of your administration and now, will make the possiblity of your one term very probable and a great may be? But never say never as President Obama may yet again survive a re-election, being the amiable masterful politician he is? However, these attempt at pleasing everybody must stop as compromises does not win elections; keeping and fulfilling election promises does and this is the only thing that matters now. President Barack Obama should look no further but to the promises he made during his election campaign and should strive to keep them.
The American people had previously weighed the options of Senator John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and a motley of others before deciding that you are the best and elected you as their president. You had no qualifying surrogate then and should not fear or feel like you have one now, just go full trottle and do what you were elected to do. Firm your back and start presiding as a duly elected democratic president of the United States of America and nothing more. Trying to woe the people who did not vote for you in 2008 is not a good strategy as they failed and refused to vote for you not because of the message but the messenger, who does not fit their template of 'their' White House occupant? As far as they are concerned, the message not withstanding, once it is coming from 'that one' makes it unpalatable and untouchable. Try as you may, they will always view you with jaundiced eyes as 'that one' and there is nothing anyone can do about it to change mindsets, already ingrained in the stone of skin coloration? One year after, the hope we voted for is still just hope? The change we can believe in, is still incubating and who knows when it will hatch if ever? Remember, no drama Obama and please roll up your sleeves now and go to work as the days of pandering or trying to be too nice to too many people including the opposition should be over. You did not get into the White House with their approval and hence you do not need their approval to govern. If the baseball bat needs to come out, so be it; but Icheoku says, you must get back your mojo and start governing. Americans need tangible things they can point to as pointers that their Obama is delivering on his election promises. Whether you will pivot from your current approach to governing or win a re-election lies in the womb of time; but your once charged supporters are nearly crest-fallen, wondering what is holding their BO. As we wait for you to finally roll out full steam, may we felicitate with you on the occasion of the anniversary of your earth-shaking and all ceiling shattering, election victory of November 4, 2008. Happy one year anniversary President Barack Hussein Obama, and may the Almighty God continue to protect you and guide your actions, our dear 44th!
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Christy 'Apena' Essien-Igbokwe , the wife of Jegede Shokoya of the New Masquerade and Nigeria's lady of songs is dead; she was 51years old. Although her family claimed that "brief Illness" killed her like so many Nigerians; Icheoku retorts that it was most likely AKwa Ibom voodoo and remote control that was used to arrest her. It is on record that she had fallen out with the governor of her native Akwa Ibiom State and have been having a relentless war for political turf with the governor? So who knows whether she was sacrificed to Ekpe cult or even Alusi-Okija as an offal; afterall African science is still very much alive and portent. May her soul rest in peace.
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Obama One Year Later: The Audacity of Winning vs. The Timidity of Governing
ReplyDeleteBy Arianna Huffington
November 4, 2009
Published by The Huffington Post.
I had arranged to meet David Plouffe on Saturday afternoon at a Starbucks on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. The night before, a copy of his new book, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory, was waiting for me when I checked into my hotel at midnight. I flipped it open, read a few lines and was hooked. I spent the rest of the night reading it.
Plouffe has written the most important political book of the year (for reasons I'll get to in a moment). It's also completely gripping. It reads like a thriller. Even though you know how it ends, you quickly get caught up in every twist and turn of perhaps the most remarkable campaign in American history.
Along the way, I found myself tearing up when I read about the campaign volunteer who had scrimped and saved ("Grabbed some ramen on the weekends... Didn't take the girl to a movie") so he could donate ten dollars to Obama, and laughed at the funny-in-retrospect tales from the trail (like David Axelrod's BlackBerry crashing at a crucial moment because of glazed donut getting stuck in the trackwheel.)
But it's not the insider look at the past that makes the book so important. It's what it shows us about the present--and the effect it could have on the future.
Plouffe's book arrives at a crossroads moment for the administration--exactly one year after the election, and one year before the 2010 midterms. A lot has happened in that year, as the audacity of winning has given way to the timidity of governing. But in recounting how the campaign team--and the candidate--not only had the audacity to win but was able to keep that audacity alive, day in and day out over the long nearly-two-year slog of the campaign, Plouffe has also shown the Obama White House the way forward.
The book is a powerful reminder of what the country voted for last year--and could serve as the trigger for Obama and his team to refocus and remember why the election mattered so much.
Most of the attention the book has gotten so far has focused on the so-called "sexy" parts--the saga of Reverend Wright, the furor over Bittergate, how Obama came to pick Biden over Hillary for VP. All of which is serving to obscure the key takeaway from the book: the fact that everything in the campaign flowed, as Plouffe puts it, from Obama's conviction that "the country needed deep, fundamental change; Washington wasn't thinking long-term... the special interests and lobbyists had too much power, and the American people needed to once again trust and engage in their democracy."
Plouffe hits this theme again and again in the book. And it's the first thing we talked about when we met (me looking bleary-eyed from my night of reading and underlining and writing in the margins; Plouffe looking relaxed and refreshed, a far-cry from the profoundly exhausted look he had the last time I saw him, in the midst of the presidential run).
The book is "not a victory lap," he tells me. "It's a reminder of how and why we won. We never forgot why we were running. That was our North Star. And we held that North Star in our sights at all times. We made many mistakes along the way, but we always remembered that we were running because, as Barack put it, the dream so many generations had fought for was slipping away."
Axelrod--or "Ax" as Plouffe refers to him throughout the book--summed up at the beginning of the campaign the core elements of the message that would guide them: "change versus a broken status quo; people versus the special interests; a politics that would lift people and the country up; and a president who would not forget the middle class."
Running a different kind of campaign became "shorthand" for the campaign. Whenever they found themselves drifting towards standard political behavior, they'd ask themselves: "If we do this, how is that running a different kind of campaign?"
As Plouffe told me: "We made sure that everyone we hired internalized our core message and defaulted to those touch points when making decisions. For our break-the-rules strategy to work, we all had to remain faithful to its principles all the time."
ReplyDeletePlouffe kept returning to the mistakes they made, but only to highlight the campaign's saving grace--its ability to course-correct, a vital survival mechanism for any successful campaign. Or successful White House.
Early in the book, Plouffe describes a tense meeting with the candidate in April 2007, after it became clear that Obama was having a hard time connecting with voters turning out to see him. Ax, Plouffe, and Peter Rouse were brutally honest with him. And the candidate agreed about the need "to find his authentic voice and reconnect with the fundamental concerns that drew him into the race in the first place. He had run to challenge the bankrupt and conventional politics of Washington, not master it."
Then there was the senior staff meeting after their dismal showing in Pennsylvania, where Obama announced: "I want us to get our mojo back. We've got to remember who we are."
Plouffe also mentions the difficult decision made right before the Iowa primary to decline John Kerry's offer to endorse Obama--a move campaign insiders felt was the wrong message to send to voters looking for change. "In the end," writes Plouffe, "the tough decision we made was unquestionably the correct one. Just about every time we took the road less traveled, we benefited."
That included the decision, which Plouffe fought hard for, to have the campaign headquartered in Chicago because "D.C. is a swamp of conventional wisdom and insiders that can suck a campaign down, and we needed to think differently." Maybe the answer to the last nine months is to move the White House to Chicago.
Indeed, reading the book, I often found myself wondering what Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what the White House is doing and say, "that's what I and my supporters worked so hard for?"
How did the candidate who got into the race because he'd decided that "the core leadership had turned rotten" and that "the people were getting hosed" become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?
How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that "the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result" become the president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying the same old politics, expecting a different result?
How could a president whose North Star as a candidate was that he "would not forget the middle class" choose as his chief economic advisor a man who recently argued against extending unemployment benefits in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great Depression?
ReplyDeleteI'm referring, of course, to Larry Summers. According to a White House official I spoke with--later confirmed by sources in the White House and on the Hill--Summers was against the extension. And it took a lot of Congressional pushing back behind the scenes for the president to overrule him.
And, according to another senior White House official, when foreclosures or job numbers come up at the regular White House morning meeting, Summers' response is that nothing can be done. Nothing can be done about skyrocketing foreclosures or lost jobs.
Nothing can be done--pretty much the opposite of "Yes we can," isn't it?
According to Plouffe, "reform is in Obama's DNA." Then how do you have in your inner circle a man who has "nothing can be done" in his DNA? Unless, of course, the problem on the table has to do with Wall Street, in which case "everything can be done, has been done, and will be done."
Obviously, an administration needs to hire people who weren't part of the campaign. But the danger comes in hiring those who don't even share the goals of the campaign. That's why The Audacity to Win is so desperately needed right now.
It reminds us that, not that long ago, the conventional wisdom was that Candidate Obama didn't have a chance and that Hillary Clinton's nomination was inevitable. That's the same conventional wisdom that tells us that President Obama doesn't have a chance at really changing things and that the ultimate victory of the entrenched special interests is inevitable.
But the Obama campaign didn't buy into the conventional wisdom then: "We had a mountain named Hillary Clinton in our path that we had to find some way to scale, get around, or blow a hole through," writes Plouffe. And the Obama White House doesn't have to give into the conventional wisdom now. It just has to get its mojo back.
One way the White House can do this is to have everyone there read Plouffe's book, filled as it is with page after page after page of reminders of who put Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
"We knew who we were," writes Plouffe, "a grassroots campaign to the core. We started with our supporters on the ground and they led us to victory." This grassroots effort "was a prime motivator for Obama to run, the belief that the American people needed to reengage in their civic life... Obama felt in his gut that if properly motivated, a committed grassroots army could be a powerful force. Over time, the volunteers became the pillars that held the whole enterprise aloft."
I asked Plouffe what happened to the 13 million people on the campaign's email list--a list he compares to having "our own television network, only better, because we communicated directly with no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number of votes we would need to win."
ReplyDelete"Volunteers have made 300,000 calls to Congress to support the president's health care plan, and held thousands of events around the country," he told me. "But it's hard to maintain the intensity of the engagement."
Of course it's hard. But, as he puts it in the book, "Obama had ignited something very powerful in young people throughout the country. If that spark could be preserved, I was convinced we'd be a much stronger country for it."
And no amount of rationalizing and sugarcoating can change the fact that the spark has not been preserved. And that we are a less strong country for it.
One of the reasons Plouffe gives in the book for the campaign deciding to forgo public funding was that, as he writes, "most painfully, taking the federal funds meant losing control of our secret weapon: we would have to largely outsource our entire grassroots ground campaign to the DNC." Which is exactly where the grassroots list--rebranded as Organization for America--is housed now. Painfully.
Plouffe talks about how the Obama team knew that in order to win, it would have to "attain the holy grail of politics--a fundamentally altered electorate. We had to expand the electorate or we were cooked." With the help of their grassroots army, they did just that. Among people who had never voted before--or who hadn't voted for a long time--71 percent voted for Obama.
Plouffe feels genuinely connected to the movement he helped unleash. "So many of the people," he told me, "who gave their heart and soul to the campaign were people who had given up on the system because they no longer believed they could trust politicians to deliver or really change anything. It is imperative for our democracy that these people are not disappointed. If they become disillusioned, they won't be coming back for a long while."
"I feel such an obligation to them," Obama told Plouffe during the campaign. "They believe in me. In us. In themselves. What keeps me going day after day? Besides a clear sense of why I am running for president, it's them, our volunteers. It is a special thing we've built here and I don't want to let them down."
I asked Plouffe if the president had read the book. "He read a couple of sections in it," he replied, "and even discovered a couple of things he didn't know."
Well, if the president wants to make sure he doesn't let down the millions who believed he really would change the rotten system, he should read the The Audacity to Win from beginning to end--and rediscover a whole host of things he knows, but seems to have forgotten.
Then he can complete the journey from The Audacity of Hope and The Audacity To Win to The Audacity to Govern
Obama's Invisible Victories
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Read More: Barack Obama, Obama One Year Later, One Year Later, Timidity To Govern, Politics News
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Share Print CommentsFrom the left we are so used to disappointment that we almost need it, but let's not indulge in sheer masochism. Politics isn't always about the bottom line, and for me, President Obama's invisible victories are immensely heartening. He has cleansed the Presidency, reinstated America's status in the world, championed ideals on every front, and spoken truth to power, whether that means calling both the Israelis and Muslims to account or facing down racism in this country.
We cannot shortchange the shift in consciousness that Obama's election stands for and that his Presidency continues to inspire in millions of people. For the first time in American history, more than a quarter of the electorate in 2008 was non-white. For Hispanics and blacks, who are grossly underrepresented in state and national legislatures, there's been a psychological turning point. For the first time, they can say "He's my President" in the same way the white majority takes for granted.
The left isn't famous for ideological compromise, and if Obama followed that example, he would be awash in failure. Instead, he has steered through Congress more stimulus for education than Bill Clinton managed in eight years. He has revamped the bailout to make it more democratic. I find myself agreeing with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who said on one of the Sunday news shows that Pres. Obama may not walk on water, but he's turned into the best swimmer in politics. If his ambitions for health care reform turn out to come anywhere near his stated goals, that will prove the point beyond a doubt.
Finally, the left is forever caught between a sense of vaunted moral righteousness and the reality that such an attitude will never win votes or pass legislation. FDR, JFK, and Bill Clinton are considerable heroes to realists and grave disappointments to arch idealists. I'm glad that idealism exists and keeps the pressure on Obama, as Hans Morgenthau did on FDR and Adlai Stevenson on JFK (there were many others, of course). Yet does he really need prompting on this front? I can't imagine a President with a clearer moral sense, a higher standard of policy, or a broader perspective about the direction of the country's future.
So let's settle back and enjoy the fruits of the most idealistic election since 1932, or if you prefer, 1960. A dose of calm and a little perspective are the right prescription, even if the anxious neurosis of being a leftist is incurable.