Message Received Loud & Clear

Some encouraging news from the Obama team:

White House aides say they have concluded that Obama too frequently lost control of the debate and his own image during the stimulus battle. By this reckoning, the story became too much about failed efforts at bipartisanship and Washington deal-making, and not enough about the president’s public salesmanship.

For Obama’s next act, the program is the same as he has been planning for months: New Deal-style plans to rescue struggling homeowners and rewrite regulations on the financial markets, plus a budget proposal that lays the groundwork for sweeping health care reform.

But the strategy to promote these items is getting an emergency overhaul. Obama plans to travel more and campaign more in an effort to pressure lawmakers with public support, rather than worrying about whether he can win over Republican votes in Congress. Officials suggested that the new, more partisan tone Obama embraced last week in his speech before House Democrats at their retreat and continued at his news conference Monday was what he should have been doing all along...Emanuel said that they recognized they had overdone their initial outreach to Republicans and had offered "a sharp message for the last week."

Now obviously I won't be taking the credit for this change in policy, but hey, not bad for a startup blogger.

H/T (Ezra Klein)

Is Bipartisianship What We Currently Need?

Obama made bipartisanship a central issue during his 2008 Presidential Campaign and succeeded in a lot of ink being spilled on his "post-partisan" nature throughout the campaign. And I, among others, applauded his effort. But looking forward, is bipartisanship really the answer to our country's current problems? While Obama has had a career of impressing the opposition party, be it as the President of the Harvard Law Review, a law professor, a state senator, a US senator, or as a Presidential candidate, it would seem he has now hit a brick wall. There is no longer common ground for the President to find with the opposition party. Or at least very little of it.

This became strikingly clear with the Stimulus Package in which, despite a few direct concessions, it still received zero Republican votes last week in the House. And then only three moderate votes in the Senate which were bought with even more concessions.

Now he has a weakened stimulus package that is still likely to be without GOP support. The Republicans have lost some popularity with the public from this (not that they had a lot to begin with), but as many have noted, it doesn't matter if the public disagrees with the GOP right now. It matters in two years and in four years, that is to say election years. If the stimulus proves a failure, Republicans can rally around a "I Told You So" call to arms and sweep back into power. Never mind the destruction its failure does to the economy in the mean time.

With that said, I still believe bipartisanship has its place in politics, just not when the gap between the two sides are so great. So come Obama's next big initiative, be it Health Care or Energy, he should learn the lesson and reach to the Left because the Right won't be compromising. Unless it's the effectiveness of the legislation.

Last point: Bipartisanship may work well for approval ratings, but not so well for electoral success.

Amateur Blogging in the LBC

And here we have it. My first blog & my first post. I've been putting this off for awhile now. The whole blogging thing that is. Mostly because I didn't have the time, but also because I didn't quite have the vision. As in, I didn't really know what kind of a blogger I wanted to be. Eventually a political blogger, or better yet some sort of policy wonk, but in the mean time I wasn't sure where to put my focus. I am very much an amateur at this, after all. But since I currently have a lot of extra time, it's 2009 & I just read Farhad Manjoo's informative How To Blog guide over at Slate, I figured now was as good as time as any to start.

So for the time being, this will be a very general & very broad blog. I imagine there will be posts on politics (local & international), public policy, music, my attempts at cooking, design, books, maybe my current job hunt & who knows what else. For now I'm hoping to post 3-5 posts a week (gotta start somewhere!) and hopefully move on from there.

Oh, and I am now officially a blogger. Exciting times.