Do you regret voting for Obama in 2008?

Although I don't regret voting for Obama, I regret that he has not become the president that he promised he'd become.

I'm fine with checks and balances but see him compromising before anyone asked him to (well, that's an exaggeration) - rather too ready to be the middle between the middle he already was and the absurd ends of the right.

My answer remains no.

Just out of curiosity, what Democratic politician- past or present - do you think would be doing a better job of wrestling liberal agenda items to fruition than has Obama so far?

Just out of curiosity, what Democratic politician- past or present - do you think would be doing a better job of wrestling liberal agenda items to fruition than has Obama so far?

C'mon. The Republicans proved that anything less than 60+ in the Senate isn't a 'solid majority' anymore.

Obama himself does something else, etc. (with many more people involved).

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

I find it fascinating how current the speech's themes are.

She does that, Biden does something else, Obama himself does something else, etc. (with many more people involved).

No-it if anyone thinks it's a HUGE MISTAKE you are a RACIST and a RELIGIOUS BIGOT.

I do, however, think Olympia Snowe would make a good Chief Negotiator.

sozobe wrote:

Obama himself does something else, etc. (with many more people involved).

Oh yeah? Then what did Obama do during the fight for healthcare reform? To me it seemed he was largely AWOL. Evidently you disagree. So what did he do?

Barack Obama, the law professor, was acting like a prosecutor. He’d invited Grassley to the Oval Office, to talk about the senator’s concerns. But he was using the occasion to confront Grassley about his latest statements. “Tell me what amendment you want, tell me what language you want,” one administration official recalls the president saying. And then, when Grassley couldn’t point to anything, the official says the president reminded Grassley that the amendment on end-of-life counseling had come from a Republican, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, and simply paid for professional advice when people wanted it.

Passage appeared to be assured only after Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak announced in the late afternoon that he and a group of antiabortion Democrats, who had pushed for more restrictive language in the original House bill, had been satisfied that the Senate version would not allow the use of federal funds to pay for the procedure. That only came after President Obama promised to sign an executive order reaffirming that the bill would maintain a "consistency with longstanding restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion." In reality, that executive order was more a symbolic move than an actual concession; the bill's supporters have insisted all along that it does nothing to change the current federal policy, known as the Hyde Amendment, which has been in effect since 1976.

On the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the President and his team were waiting and working the phones to make sure the final votes were nailed down.

And so, from Obama’s perspective, passing a health care plan this fall isn’t primarily a question of whether to include an “individual mandate” requiring every American to have insurance or how fully to regulate providers or even how to hit back against “Harry and Louise”–type attack ads, although his aides spend time contemplating all of those things. It’s more about navigating the dueling personalities and complex agendas within his own party’s Congress. Rather than laying out an intricate plan and then trying to sell it on the Hill, as Clinton did, Obama’s strategy seems to be exactly the opposite — to sell himself to Congress first and worry about the details later. As Emanuel likes to tell his West Wing staff: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”

Obama hardly knew Baucus during his abbreviated Senate term; Baucus remarked to me offhandedly that Obama “didn’t really serve in the Senate,” which seems to be the prevailing sentiment among senators who saw him for only a brief time before he took off to run for president. But Obama’s White House has been trying mightily, in ways both overt and indirect, to make up for lost time. Since the inauguration, Baucus has been to the White House twice for personal meetings with the president and once for a dinner at which he was seated next to the first lady. (They talked about Sidwell Friends, the school from which Baucus’s son graduated and where the Obama girls are now.)

On a flight to Trinidad aboard Air Force One in April, Obama called Baucus to his cabin — along with Charles Rangel, Baucus’s counterpart in the House — to talk health care for a half-hour or so. “He just turned to me and said, ‘This is my No. 1 issue,’ ” Baucus recalled. “He wants meaningful, comprehensive health care. He doesn’t want to pass something where everybody gets flu shots.”

Perhaps most significant, Rahm Emanuel hired Jim Messina, who was Baucus’s longtime chief of staff and who worked last year on the Obama campaign, as a deputy chief of staff at the White House — a move that seems not entirely coincidental. Messina wasn’t just another aide to Baucus; when Messina informed the senator, on the eve of Baucus’s son’s wedding last summer, that he was leaving the Senate to go work for Obama’s campaign, Baucus amended his dinner toast to say that he was losing not one son but two. The two men talk more or less constantly, giving Baucus a close ally in the White House and the president an influential advocate.

Gah. Seriously? Shall I answer what he did to win the presidency in the first place, too?

So the short version is -- Obama did a shitload of stuff, much of it subtle and not-obvious, to get health care reform passed.

Obama is not the schmoozer that Clinton was, nor does he bestow nicknames like Bush. Rather, he has impressed lawmakers with a direct, businesslike manner and an outward deference to the legislative branch. As Obama mulled whether to nominate Sonia Sotomayor or some other jurist to the Supreme Court last month, he called every member of the Judiciary Committee personally, taking the “advise” part of “advise and consent” to a level that impressed some longtime senators. “This is the first time I’ve ever been called by a president on a Supreme Court nomination, be it a Republican or a Democrat,” Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, told Peter Baker and Adam Nagourney of The Times after Sotomayor’s nomination was announced. A hallmark of Obama’s style, in these early months, has been to meet with key senators alone, without the phalanx of aides who almost always attend Oval Office meetings. Three senators with whom I spoke, including Baucus, had been impressed by this tactic; it implies equality between the branches of government and enables Obama to establish personal relationships more quickly than he otherwise might.

ALTHOUGH WASHINGTON DEMOCRATS, in their euphoria over winning back total control of the capital, often overlook this fact, Clinton’s Congressional landscape during the health care debate in 1993 was, in terms of sheer numbers, strikingly similar to the one Obama has now inherited. At this time in 1993, Clinton’s party controlled 56 seats in the Senate and 258 seats in the House. Obama can claim a slightly higher margin than that in the Senate — he’ll have 60 seats, including independents, if the Minnesota courts release Al Franken from his purgatory — and his party has 256 House seats, or two fewer than Clinton’s. In other words, if Obama is to succeed where Clinton did not, it will have to be a triumph of circumstance and political salesmanship rather than a reflection of simple math.

The Clintons, fresh from their shared experience with a small-state legislature, at first chose to commandeer the legislative process, simply delivering their bill to Congress for ratification. This is, incidentally, precisely the same tactic that George W. Bush tried when he virtually demanded that a Republican Congress pass his prepackaged Social Security plan in 2005. The lesson, according to members of Obama’s team, is that professional legislators consider it their business to legislate. “One of the mistakes of the past is that when presidents arrive on Capitol Hill with legislation chiseled into stone, it’s not well received,” says David Axelrod, one of Obama’s most influential advisers. “You have to give people a sense of ownership.”

The lesson Obama’s team took from [the stimulus package experience], and one that will no doubt inform its approach to health care, is that it’s fine for a president to stand back from the process — but not so far back that Congress thinks he’s trying to duck the consequences or that the public comes to see the whole enterprise as just another Congressional spending spree. If Obama is going to sign a transformative health care law this year, it will, at some point soon, have to become his plan, no matter how much autonomy he wants to confer on his allies in Congress.

That’s why the House forced Senate leaders to accept a provision in the budget that allows health care to pass by “reconciliation” — an arcane budgeting maneuver that would enable Senate Democrats to force through a bill with a simple majority, rather than with the 60 votes needed to forestall a filibuster. But in the Senate, Baucus remains determined to send to the floor a bill with bipartisan support; passing health care reform by reconciliation, he says, would make the new law unsustainable in the long term.

It seems likely that Obama, who has to this point focused on a sophisticated legislative strategy for achieving health care reform, will at some point soon have to take his case to the public instead — this time asking Americans not just to support an ambitious expansion of government but to accept the sacrifices necessary to do it. Only a president will make that case, and only a president can.