So Voting “Present” Isn’t Such A Good Trait After All

There are two statements that turned out to be prescient in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election:

“In the oval office, you can’t just vote present.”
— Hillary Rodham Clinton

“If you want to know what someone is going to do, take a look at what they’ve done.”
— General Wesley Clark

Huffington Post of all places offered a brilliant article by Drew Westen, Ph.D*.,entitled Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator. Westen’s skillful deconstruction of President Obama laments that Obama doesn’t believe in anything enough to fight for it. He points to the real reason Obama’s polls are tumbling –- the American people are waking up to his continuously voting “present” on issues that matters to them.

I am humbled by Westen’s comprehensive article. I may not agree with everything he says, but this is a true believer with a rational argument. I will not quote the bulk of it, though I’d like to. While principle stops me from including a link to H/P, I do suggest you read it in its entirety. So many of us who were ostracized and insulted last year more than suspected this would be Obama’s style of “governing.” Prof. Westen states it very well:

What’s costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

Bingo. By the way, if this piece appears on HuffPo with many echoing agreement in the comments, hell has indeed frozen over:

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn’t hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president’s leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress’s penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

What’s costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn’t a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

Consider the president’s leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there’s a conflict, because if there’s a conflict, he doesn’t want to be anywhere near it.

…We have seen the same pattern of pretty speeches followed by empty exhortations on issue after issue.

But the true fighter who would have been able to act as Westen wishes is Hillary. She would lead, unafraid to deal with a tough issue or go to the mat and fight for it. Her frank demeanor, history of reaching across the aisle, indefatigable nature and willingnesss to take on President Bush (as she did with RU486, benefits of Guardsman and first responders) demonstrates her credentials in that regard. Her tireless work now as SoS only enhances that reputation. Westen continues:

The president has, on more than one occasion, gone to Wall Street or called in its titans (who have often just ignored him and failed to show up) to exhort them to be nice to the people they’re foreclosing at record rates, yet he has done virtually nothing for those people. His key program for preventing foreclosures is helping 4 percent of those “lucky” enough to get into it, not the 75 percent he promised, and many of the others are having their homes auctioned out from right under them because of some provisions in the fine print. One in four homeowners is under water and one in six is in danger of foreclosure. Why we’re giving money to banks instead of two-year loans — using the model of student loans — to homeowners to pay their mortgages (on which they don’t have to pay interest or principal for two years, while requiring their banks to renegotiate their interest rates in return for saving the banks from “toxic assets”) is something the average person doesn’t understand. And frankly, I don’t understand it, either. I thought I voted Democratic in the last election.

Same with the credit card companies. Great speech about the fine print. Then the rates tripled. …

The president has exhorted the banks, who are getting zero-interest money, to give more of it to small businesses. But they have no incentives to do that. …

The time for exhortation is over. FDR didn’t exhort robber barons to stem the redistribution of wealth from working Americans to the upper 1 percent, and neither did his fifth cousin Teddy. Both men told the most powerful men in the United States that they weren’t going to rip off the American people any more, and they backed up their words with actions. Teddy Roosevelt was clear that capital gains taxes should be high relative to income taxes because we should reward work, not “gambling in stocks.” This President just doesn’t have the stomach to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do (except women to have unwanted babies because they can’t afford an abortion or live in a red state and don’t have an employer who offers insurance), and his advisors are enabling his most troubling character flaw, his conflict-avoidance.

Westen’s next comment is as surprising as it is damning.

Like most Americans I talk to, when I see the president on television, I now change the channel the same way I did with Bush. With Bush, I couldn’t stand his speeches because I knew he meant what he said. I knew he was going to follow through with one ignorant, dangerous, or misguided policy after another. With Obama, I can’t stand them because I realize he doesn’t mean what he says — or if he does, he just doesn’t have the fire in his belly to follow through. He can’t seem to muster the passion to fight for any of what he believes in, whatever that is. He’d make a great queen — his ceremonial addresses are magnificent — but he prefers to fly Air Force One at 60,000 feet and “stay above the fray.”

As a lot of bloggers on this and other sites have noted, who would have thought the façade would peel away so quickly?

It’s the job of the president to be in the fray. It’s his job to lead us out of it, not to run from it. It’s his job to make the tough decisions and draw lines in the sand. But Obama really doesn’t seem to want to get involved in the contentious decisions. They’re so, you know, contentious. …

Do you think Americans ought to have one choice of health insurance plans the insurance companies don’t control, or don’t you? I don’t want to hear that it would sort of, kind of, maybe be your preference, all other things being equal. Do you think we ought to use health care as a Trojan Horse for right-wing abortion policies? Say something, for God’s sake.

He doesn’t need a chief of staff. He needs someone to shake him until he feels something strongly enough not just to talk about it but to act.

Odd that Westen describes Obama, a man elected because of his “vision” as clearly lacking a coherent vision or message, likewise condemning his willingness to throw women and gay voters under the bus to the bargain…

He doesn’t want to talk about social issues, even though they predictably have gotten in the way of health care reform and will do the same on one issue after another. Abortion? You don’t advance a progressive position by giving a center-right speech at Notre Dame that emphasizes cutting back on the number of abortions without mentioning that sex education and birth control might be useful means to that end, mumbling something about a conscience clause that suggests that pharmacists don’t have to fill birth control prescriptions if it offends their sensibilities, and allowing states to use health care reform to set back the rights of women and couples to decide when to start their families based on somebody else’s faith. If you believe that freedom includes the freedom to decide when you will or won’t have a child, say it, say it with moral conviction, and follow it up with action. Perhaps something as simple as this: “I won’t sign a health bill into law that forces women and couples to have a child they did not intend and are not ready to parent because of the dictates of someone else’s faith or conscience.” You know what? A message of that sort wins by 25 points nationally, and you can speak it in Southern and win with evangelical Christians in the deep south if you speak to them honestly in the language of faith. That shouldn’t be hard for a president who is a religious Christian.

Gays? Virtually all Americans are for repealing don’t ask/don’t tell (except for conservatives who haven’t yet come to terms with their own homosexuality — but don’t tell them that, or at least don’t ask). This one’s a no-brainer. Tell Congress you want a bill on your desk by January 1, and announce that you have serious questions about the constitutionality of the current policy and won’t enforce it until your Justice Department has had time to study it. Don’t keep firing gay Arabic interpreters. But that would require not just giving the pretty speech on how we’re all equal in the eyes of God and we should all be equal in the eyes of the law (a phrase he might want to try sometime). It would require actually doing something that might anger a small percentage of the population on the right, and that’s just too hard for this president to do. It’s one thing to acknowledge and respect the positions of people who hold different points of view. It’s another to capitulate to them.

Make your case to the American people, make it evocatively, and draw the line in the sand. That’s how you earn people’s respect. That’s the only thing that will bring Independents back.

This White House has no coherent message on anything. The message on health care reform changed even more frequently than the interest rates on credit cards last Spring, and turned a 70-30 winning issue into its current 30-50 status with the public. Last week on the Sunday news shows, I remember watching in disbelief as Larry Summers smugly told the 15 million Americans out of work that the recession was definitively over and that all economists agree. Then Christina Romer, another of the President’s chief economic advisors, announced on the next show that the recession is definitely not over.

That’s simply inexcusable. [snip]

To be honest, I don’t know what the president believes on anything, and I’m not alone among American voters.

[snip]

Abortion? Who knows. Gays? I suspect intellectually he believes in equal rights but deep down he thinks they’re icky. Something is sure holding him back from doing the obvious. Immigrants? He probably has an opinion, but he’s not going to waste political capital on them; he sold them out in 15 seconds on health care. Foreclosures? Nice speeches, and I’m sure it really concerns him when he hears the stories of families firsthand. But not enough to divert the cash from the lenders to the borrowers. And the problem is, the average American knows it. Job creation? Would be nice, and I presume he believes that people who want to work ought to be able to work. But when 700,000 people were losing their jobs a month in his first few months of office and over millions have lost their jobs on his watch… three letters should have come to mind: W – P – A. President Roosevelt had no legs to stand on, but he sure had spine.

Westen concludes by discussed the concept of “Obampromise” – no policy or principle is enough to fight for if it means pissing off the moneyed interests he relies on.

And here are a few more choice quotes. Frankly, I couldn’t agree more:

…[The] international community is just starting to learn that his eloquence doesn’t always have much behind it.

…[I]t would be hard to name a single thing President Obama has done domestically that any other Democrat wouldn’t have done if he or she were president following George W. Bush.

What’s they’re seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That’s a recipe for going nowhere fast — but getting there by November.

If one’s entire being has always been about pleasing people, ‘being a blank slate onto whom people can project their dreams,’ how should such a person suddenly grow a spine of steel when the number one quality they possess is the ability to craft a façade and protect it at all costs.

Secretary Clinton warned everyone about voting for a man who voted “present” 130 times in the State Senate, and who waffled on his positions constantly on the campaign trail. His stalling for months on the Afghanistan decision, then pretty much doing what we figured he was going to do anyway, is just one case in point. President Obama had never before evidenced the ability to lead or make tough decisions. In 2008, we were told that didn’t matter. The very qualities he lacks are precisely the ones he is lost without. Only no one is willing to give him memo. Certainly not his staff.

Years from now, books will be written on the mass delusion that captured the nation to put such an inexperienced and insincere man in office.

*Westen is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.