Usable Insight – A Non-Compelling Reason to Re-elect President Obama
There is a reason that President Obama should be re-elected that he will never tell us.
Few Presidents ever accomplish much except in the first two years of their first term and/or the first two and half years of their second term, and especially the latter.
Why?
When a President is elected, the losing candidate tells us that we must now throw our support behind the winner and be unified. And for the first two years, it would look bad to appear as a spoil sport to vociferously undermine the new President in their first term. However after the first two years, the opposing party needs to then start stirring dissent, because it needs to focus on winning in the mid-term elections.
And then of course there is the need for a President who doesn’t really understand Congress to learn how to deal with it. President Johnson understood Congress and how to deal with it which may explain his effectiveness even in addition to the desire to push through programs that JFK stood for (but may not have been able to push through had he lived). Johnson’s undoing appears to have been the highly unpopular Vietnam War.
I can’t think of a President in modern times that did not serve in a leadership position in Congress (as was the case with Johnson) who didn’t underestimate the grdilock in Washington he would need to work around and through to be effective. It often takes a full term to understand how to deal more effectively with Congress and then add to that how to deal with a Congress that favors the opposing party after the mid-term elections.
Thus the best chance for a President to actually get things done is in the first two and a half years of their second term when they don’t have to worry about re-election and don’t have to worry about helping the campaign of their party’s candidate after that second term is over.
The question is whether a President in his first term has performed so egregiously poorly that he shouldn’t be given a second term.
What this boils down to is that if you want to have a President that actually accomplishes things during his Presidency, it is better to elect him (or her) for two terms. Perhaps this is why the notion of a single six or eight year term for President raises it head every now and then for consideration.
I am an independent and based on the above I think electing President Obama for a second term to give him the chance to be more effective in the first two and half years of that term makes more sense than electing Governor Romney who will need to learn the ropes in his first term, unless what he proposes to do he can get done in the first two years of a first term.
If I were a betting man, judging the politics and gridlock of Washington, I think that is unlikely.
What are your thoughts?
Tags: election 2012, obama, romney
November 1st, 2012 at 2:58 pm
Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’m an independent too… (fiscally conservative, socially liberal).
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November 4th, 2012 at 5:46 am
Dear Dr. Goulston, I frequently appreciate your insight and perspective. This is no exception. Unfamiliarity is certainly a cause for ineffectiveness early on but I don’t think it is sufficient to explain poor performance. Shame on us for electing high-potentials without vetting them against the critical criteria required for success in the job.
Also, unfortunately for US citizens, job number 1 for incumbents is to get re-elected and not necessarily to serve their constituents. If incumbents embraced Jeff Immelt’s advice and performed with integrity and focus on the current job, the competent ones would have greater success and less trouble getting re-elected. Part of the problem is that incumbents can circumvent the performance hurdle with money derived from their position of power and influence.
In my opinion performance would improve with more transparency and less influence of money: Politicians should every day publish who they met with yesterday, who gave them money and how much money. Shining a light on their behavior should promote the right behavior which should in turn improve their performance and increase their re-electability.
November 6th, 2012 at 11:07 am
Mark …You’ve titled your piece correctly by including …”a non-compelling reason”. There is nothing compelling about your argument here. While few mistake Washington D.C. as anything short of a political battleground in a war of ideas which certainly contributes to gridlock, don’t overlook the incredibly resistant power of a beauracracy itself in slugishly undermines advancements from either party. This certainly provides an argument against the goverments largess that ultimately leads to more gridlock.
Your assertion that an incoming president is naive to the challenges ahead is entirely preposterous, especially in dealing with congress, since the one thing that is being overlooked, for whatever reason, is that the President was a member of Congress for two of the four years that they were a majority. So the notion that he didn’t know/didn’t understand how congress works has little merit. Of the remaining two years of that four-year majority, he was POTUS — basically giving his party decidedly large amounts of power, which they used to pass the partisan Affordable Healthcare Act …now you want to sell me on the notion that an inability to understand how Congress works should merit some sort of pass?
No, the issue is that Romney and Obama have two diametrically opposed visions for the United States of America. It’s clear to anyone who’s examined Obama’s writings that his vision is one for creating a Euro-socialistic government, one where it’s hands are set upon engineering every aspect of a citizen’s life. Romney’s POV is that of a business man and a successful one at that. Most amazing to me is that in this present culture factions have been able to demonize business successes and prepose that the same makes their business leaders somehow unqualified to be president.
Obama’s blatantly reckless spending spree and bureaucratically engineered mandates will only further lead this country toward a bankrupted euro-socialism. And, frankly his actions in this area speak a lot louder than his words.
When you say let’s give Obama a chance to be more effective, I’d ask at what? Do you honestly believe offering him executive coaching will help him to collaborate in a more positive fashion will do anything to transform his bankrupt policies?
November 10th, 2012 at 4:48 am
The GOP has to stop pandering to he religious right. It is now an environment where a historic standard-bearer, like Reagan, would never survive the primaries.