Dear President Obama, I think you should…
Unless you’ve turned off all your electronic media, it’s impossible to avoid all the advice now being given to the President after the “shellacking” of the Democrats in the midterm elections last Tuesday. The exhortations are flowing like the great Mississipi toward the President’s ear.
Whether he’s listening to any of it, who knows? But I’ve been reading a sampling of the good counsel for the past few days. From that mass of words, here are three offerings that I found of particular interest.
First
From Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. Blogging for Huffington Post, Roth begins with this (“We Need to Create Trust” Nov 3, 2010):
One of the striking things that this week’s elections forcefully represents is the dramatic erosion of trust in President Obama. Two years ago he hadn’t yet earned our confidence, but he did inspire deep trust. Our frustration with his leadership has not just been disappointment with specific policies that haven’t worked. The frustration and the anger seem also to come from a feeling of betrayal — feeling that we trusted the wrong guy. The elections don’t really show any movement to “the right guys.” They just demonstrate a vacuum of trust — the triumph of suspicion.
This can be fixed. Here are three things Obama can do that would help…
Read full piece here.
Next
The second offering of pointed advice for the President comes from Ruth Rosen, a visiting professor of history at the University of California Berkeley. Rosen parcels out the blame not only to Obama but also to progressives.
Rosen proposes emulating the successful models of the women’s and civil rights’ movements. In particular, she argues that the big failure was the President’s and progressives’ failure to grab and guard the chance to open a national conversation on the issues and engage in a public debate (“US Election 2010: Obama lost the terms of debate and a large segment of white women” Nov 4. 2010).
Excerpt:
By now, most people know that many white women in the nation either sat out this election or switched to the Republicans out of economic fear. Yet Obama did little to remind women how much he had, in fact, done for them: He ended the gag rule; he made sure that women could sue for discriminatory pay; and his health care program and the stimulus helped many women protect their families and keep their jobs. But he needed to shout these from the White House because women’s fears, amidst so much unemployment and so many foreclosures, certainly eclipsed what he actually did for them. In short, he didn’t give white women a reason to vote for him. It was minority women who gave him their votes. Had he courted all women and addressed their needs for economic security and child care, the conversation might have been quite different.
What Obama, Democrats and progressives failed to do during this electoral cycle was to define and then proudly grab the terms of debate…
Read full article here.
And a powerful punch
The third serving up of advice come from Markos Moulitsas at DailyKos.com. In the pugilistic and colorful style that has carried him from obscurity only a few years ago and made him one of the most prominent voices (on blogosphere and off) for progressives nationally, Markos plucks out and explains the most important stats and events of the midterm elections (“The battle for 2012 starts NOW”, Nov 3, 2010).
He begins by admonishing Obama and team:
What has happened has happened. I’m less interested in talking about the ways the administration screwed up, than in what they’re going to do about it in preparation of 2012. First thing’s first — stop bashing the base, or the professional left, or whatever liberal boogeymen pisses them off. Fact is, people who fall in those disaffected categories — the young, blacks, Latinos — don’t read blogs, or watch Keith Olbermann, or read Firedoglake. But they are losing their jobs and their homes, and they see Wall Street get all manners of bailouts without any of it trickling down to them. That has killed us. Make their lives better, or … at least fight to make their lives better…
Read full post here.
