OBAMA FOR USA

Five of the U.S. historians whose insights President Barack Obama sought at a dinner last summer give him grades averaging a B-plus for his first year in office if his push for health-care legislation succeeds.

Obama’s handling of the economy won praise; what was seen as a lack of leadership on health care and a missed opportunity to seize on populist outrage about bank bonuses earned criticism. Making the judgments were Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Dallek, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley and David Kennedy, who were among nine historians at the June 30 White House meal.

The ultimate assessment of Obamaâ€™s first year hinges on the fate of his bid to overhaul the U.S. health-care system, said Brands, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

If the measure passes, “then the main thing that he aimed for this year was a success,” said Brands. “If it falls apart, he’s a loser.”

Passage prospects suffered a blow Jan. 19 when Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown won the Senate seat Democrat Edward Kennedy had held. When Brown takes office, Republicans will have the 41 Senate votes needed to stall action on a bill.

“One of the things that the Massachusuetts race generates is that Obama doesn’t pull any votes,” Brands says. “And good political leaders have long coattails. Apparently Obama didn’t do that and if he can’t do it in Massachusetts where can he do it?”

Oprah Interview

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired Dec. 13, Obama gave himself a “good solid B-plus,” saying the grade would become an A-minus with passage of the health-care measure. “I think that we have inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Obama said. “We stabilized the economy, prevented the possibilities of a great depression, or a significant financial meltdown.”

Kennedy, a professor at Stanford University, near Palo Alto California, said history may judge that Obama made a “tactical error in not teeing up the health-care bill a little differently, maybe waiting until there’d been more economic recovery.”

During their two-hour meal of lamb chops, tomato and mozzarella salad and peach melba, the historians said Obama pelted them with questions about how Roosevelt and President Lyndon B. Johnson cajoled legislators to pass ambitious domestic agendas.

Obama, 48, was “most interested in what you might call the mechanics of how presidents got things done,” said Kennedy.

Three of the other dinner guests, Garry Wills, Michael Beschloss and Kenneth Mack, declined to comment. Robert Caro didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Bank Fees Timing

Obama’s announcement last week of a proposed fee on the country’s largest financial institutions to help recoup taxpayer bailout money didn’t come soon enough, said most of the historians.

“Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the ‘economic royalists’, as he called them,” said Brands. “Roosevelt understood how to use political enemies, how to identify those bad people who did the bad things to the country. Obama hasn’t chosen that road.”

Brands, 56, gave the president a B-plus, based partially on “the avoidance of any major mistakes, but no huge accomplishments.”

Goodwin, author “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” said Obama should fight more aggressively for his proposed overhaul of financial regulations.

‘Populist Fervor’

“He can get populist fervor answered by taking on that issue,” said Goodwin, 67. “He needs to reconnect with the people and mobilize the forces that were for him on the campaign.”

Goodwin and Kennedy each said their A-minus grades for Obama would become B-pluses if a health-care bill doesn’t pass.

“I think he’s done a remarkable job of maintaining his zen-like quality this year,” said Brinkley, 49, a historian at Rice University in Houston. “He always seems to be in the zone and he’s unflappable, but sometimes this year people wanted to see him flap.”

Brinkley gave the president an overall grade of B, based on foreign policy and for being the “most untarnished political figure in America.” For his relationship with Congress, though, Brinkley gave Obama a D.

“He needed to have the Obama health-care plan bound and ready so he could tell Congress, ‘this is our plan,’” rather than set broad goals as the House and Senate shaped their own bills, Brinkley said.

Brinkley wouldn’t discuss details of the June dinner because he said it was off the record.

Dallek, author of several presidential biographies, said he couldn’t decide whether Obama merited an A-minus or B-plus.

‘Minor Miracle’

He said passage of health-care legislation would be a “minor miracle” because Obama has had to rely solely on the Democratic caucus in the Senate to advance the bill.

“The kind of bipartisanship that existed in the 1950’s” when House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Texas Democrat, and Johnson, a Texas Democrat who was Senate majority leader, worked with Republican President Dwight Eisenhower “is not within anyone’s grasp now,” said Dallek, 75.

Kennedy, 68, agreed with Dallek. Calling Congress “an awkward-to-operate contraption,” he said Obama was hindered by “the relatively thin majorities” his party has in both chambers unlike the larger majorities Roosevelt and Johnson enjoyed during their early years in office.

Dallek praised Obama’s deliberative process as he decided to send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. He also said the war there “has the potential to be his biggest failure” if it “drains away the energy for his domestic reform programs and traps him into something that in some way or other resembles Iraq or Vietnam.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Kate Andersen Brower in Washington at Kandersen7@bloomberg.net

http://obamaforusa.blogspot.com/

CHOICES YOUR DREAMS, WANTS AND NEEDS
www.video2be.com

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Obama Grade From Historians Will Drop Without Health-Care Bill

OBAMA FOR USA

http://obamaforusa.blogspot.com/

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Labels

TOP VIDEO2BE

New Update

MOST PEOPLE READ

MOST VIEW

BANNER LINK