Kommentary on Obama 4

All:

Obama feels weathered into his job now. That’s good and not-so-good. It’s good because you pretty much know how he’s going to manage the rest of his presidency, seeing the temperament and tactics he brought to his first year. He’s a known quantity. It’s not-so-good because he appears to have dedicated the rest of his presidency to backing away from bold initiatives and pursuing a tedious trudge through never-ending comprehensive. He seems to have been chastened by the senatorial upset in Massachusetts and the consequent derailing of his healthcare insurance reform initiative. He’s too smart to not have realized this weathered-in, hunkering-down, partisan-politicking-as-usual day would arrive. But he’s also too smart to not know that this coming mid-term election could have as disastrous a result for his party as 1994’s. I’d like to believe that Obama won’t fall prey to the personal peccadilloes that undermined Clinton in the 90s, and that required superhuman stamina to endure, further distracting from that president’s initially hopeful agenda.

Jim