White House: Tuesday's GOP wins not about Obama
2 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The White House says that Republican wins in two governors' races were not referendums on the president. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday that voters went to the polls in Virginia and New Jersey to work through "very local issues that didn't involve the president." The presidential spokesman said voters were concerned about the economy.
"I don't think the president needed an election or an exit poll to come to that conclusion," Gibbs said.
By contrast, Gibbs acknowledged that the 2010 midterm congressional elections will be more about the Obama agenda. Republicans turned aside Democratic candidates in both Virginia and New Jersey, raising questions about the limits of the president's influence on his party's base of support and on the moderate lawmakers he needs to advance his legislative priorities.
Gibbs noted that Democrats did win two special elections for congressional seats, in California and New York.
Gibbs said Obama telephoned both Democratic losers, incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey and candidate Creigh Deeds in Virginia, Tuesday night. But Gibbs said Obama has not yet called the two GOP gubernatorial winners because he wanted to let them celebrate with family and supporters.
The president had campaigned for both Corzine and Deeds in recent days.
The White House sees no need to recalibrate its legislative agenda or message based on the results of the governors' races or the swing of independents in this election toward the GOP, Gibbs said. And he expressed no concern that the election results will make conservative Democrats on Capitol Hill more skittish toward backing the president's agenda as they head toward their own re-election bids in 2010.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_obama_elections
'Change has come' ... or has it?
John F. Harris
Wed Nov 4, 4:52 am ET
In the year since he was elected president, Barack Obama has revealed himself as one of the boldest leaders to occupy the Oval Office in the modern era.
In that same year, Obama also has revealed himself to be an innately self-protective, constantly calibrating and, in some surprising ways, supremely conventional politician.
So who is Barack Obama? The drama of this presidency — in sharp relief with Wednesday’s one-year anniversary of his 2008 triumph — revolves around how Obama navigates his own contradictions.
Obama turns out not to be a Bill Clinton-style centrist or a Paul Wellstone-style liberal. His plans for health care and his trillion-plus dollars in new spending have earned the ire of Rush Limbaugh for being too grandiose and of Arianna Huffington for not being grandiose enough.
Obama is the president as grand improvisationalist: a leader of epic ambitions who — when faced with a difficult choice — almost always pursues his aims with a pedestrian strategy and style.
This may be a shrewd approach to governing. But it manages almost by definition to defy and disappoint the huge — and wildly divergent — expectations Obama encouraged supporters to harbor for his presidency.
As the election anniversary approached, Obama several times in public remarks acknowledged the sense of letdown and pleaded for patience.
“‘Well, why haven’t you solved world hunger yet?’” Obama said in New Orleans the other day, mimicking the cries of critics. “‘Why — it’s been nine months. Why?’ You know? I never said it was going to be easy. What did I say during the campaign? I said change is hard. And big change is harder. And after the last nine months, you know I wasn’t kidding.”
Obama may not have promised change would be easy. But he did convey what now looks like a too-glib impression that he could unite opposites and reconcile contradictions by the power of personality — hard to do when his own personality has competing strands.
Obama has the soul of an ideologue. He wants to be a transformational president — unconfined by the limitations of conventional politics and determined to put a lasting mark on his era.
In his first year, he has presided over more new domestic spending than Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, did in eight years. The “big bang” agenda he laid out earlier this year on health care, energy and financial regulation unmistakably signaled his ambition to vastly expand the role of government in American life.
But Obama also has the soul of an operative. He and his West Wing team — dominated at the top by people whose expertise is in the world of campaigns and Washington maneuvers — have proved to be far more familiar political types than they admit to themselves or than was forecast by his insurgent campaign and the expansive, at times almost messianic, rhetoric that powered it.
“What surprises me most is the loss of Barack Obama as movement leader,” Malika Saada Saar, a human rights organizer, said on POLITICO’s Arena forum.
As Obama’s campaign reached its climax, in Saar’s memory, it conjured up echoes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Now that he has entered office, she finds that spirit missing: “During this time of economic decline, two raging wars and an uncertain future for so many Americans, we need a movement-leader president who can call forward our courage and relentlessly move us toward making the difficult policy changes that we need.”
When it comes to policy, Obama is more willing than any Democratic president since Lyndon B. Johnson to propose expansive goals — but is insistent always on preserving flexibility in the name of realism or political self-protection.
On health care, it is clear that Obama’s team is more concerned with a victory — one his team expects by the end of the year — than with the programmatic details. On national security, he so far has offered far more continuity with George W. Bush on Iraq, Afghanistan and anti-terror policies than many of his most ardent supporters were expecting.
When it comes to politics, Obama and his team have proved more comfortable navigating within the Washington system that greeted them than with changing the culture of the capital. A West Wing that features skilled operatives like Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs is no less politically obsessed than when Karl Rove roamed the same halls.
“I suppose what has surprised me most is how quickly the promises of comity, outreach and post-partisanship were abandoned,” James G. Gimpel, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, said on the Arena forum. “But maybe that’s because I was starting to believe the hype, and I should have maintained an appropriately skeptical stance all along. In this last year, we have again been reminded that governing is not campaigning.”
As it happens, the Obama team is never happier — as in its frequent public disputes with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or the insurance industry — than when it can adopt campaign-style tactics to frame an adversary for public advantage.
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