A president's first year in office is often a time for learning. The harshest lessons are beginners' mistakes, like the Bay of Pigs fiasco for JFK. The real key is to figure out how to Tiffany Set for sale the prestige of the office to get things done: when to conserve your political capital, and when and how to spend it. Judging from Obama's campaign, which revolutionized politics with its ability to tap grassroots networks of donors and activists, many expected President Obama to go over the heads of Congress and mobilize popular passions to achieve his top priorities. But on what may be his signature issue, that wasn't really the case.Obama came close to prematurely ending his effectiveness as president before finally pulling out the stops. In the last push for the health-care bill, he reminded voters of Obama the candidate, fiery and full of hope. But during the health-reform bill's long slog up and around Capitol Hill, Obama was a strangely passive figure. He sometimes seemed more peeved than engaged. His backers naturally wondered why he seemed to abandon the field to the tea partiers. The answer may be that at some level he just doesn't like politics, not the way Bill Clinton or LBJ or a "happy warrior" like Hubert Humphrey thrived on the press of flesh, the backroom deal, and the roar of the crowd. That doesn't mean Obama can't thrive or be successful-even Richard Nixon Tiffany Watch for sale elected to two terms. But it does mean that the country is run by what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wryly called "the conquering professor"-a president who leads more from the head than the heart, who often relies more on listening than preaching.
Obama entered politics as a community organizer, and as a presidential candidate he oversaw an operation that brilliantly organized from the ground up. So it was a puzzle to Marshall Ganz, a longtime community organizer, that Obama seemed to neglect the basic rule of a grassroots organizer: to mobilize and, if necessary, polarize your popular base against a common enemy. Instead, President Obama seemed to withdraw and seek not to offend while Congress squabbled. "It was a curiously passive strategy," says Ganz, who worked for 16 years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School. In a way, he says, Obama's "fear of a small conflict made a big conflict inevitable."The health-care battle "was a tiffany near-death experience for the president and congressional leaders," says Bill Galston, formerly Clinton's domestic adviser and now an old Washington hand at the Brookings Institution. Galston describes Obama's style as "drift and mastery." He recalls early in Obama's presidential campaign, in the summer of 2007, when the candidate seemed oddly inert as he dropped in the polls. Then he perfected a rousing stump speech, just in time for the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. Obama, says Galston, seems to have his own "inner gyroscope," but he also shows a distaste for the messy business of governing in fractious Washington. "He has something approaching contempt for the hyperreactional government in Washington, where people pay way too much attention to the crisis of the moment," says Galston.
The president doesn't have all that much use for the niceties of international diplomacy, either. Early in his term, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke of renewing the "special relationship" between Britain and the U.S. When he came calling in Washington in the winter of 2009, Brown brought a penholder crafted from the timbers of a 19th-century British ship that blockaded the African slave trade. Obama's Oval Office desk is made from the timbers of a Tiffany Bangle ship. In return, Obama gave Brown a lame gift of some Hollywood DVDs and blew him off without a dinner or press conference. Brown has stayed miffed. More recently, Obama has given the cold shoulder to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. That may have been more calculated-a rebuff intended to get Israel to act more in line with U.S. interests. One can imagine LBJ exercising the same manipulative disdain.
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