The President That Obama’s Critics (On The Left) Want

by Stuart Shapiro

A couple of weeks ago, Maureen Dowd wrote a widely derided column about how President Obama needed to act like a fictional president.  Heck, even President Obama made fun of it.  Well, on Wednesday, Dowd doubled down.

Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership.

It’s funny that Obama’s critics on the right accuse him of being a dictator while Dowd accuses him of not being one. Steve Benen gives the rational response.

It is? That’s leadership? We have co-equal branches of government, with the executive in the hands of one party, and most the legislative in the hands of another. If the latter refuses to be responsible, it’s necessarily evidence of the former’s failure of leadership?

Not only is this at odds with Civics 101 — the president is not in charge of the Congress and cannot tell it what it do — it’s a superficial analysis. Obama “somehow” has to get lawmakers to bend to his will. How? Dowd didn’t say. Just “somehow.”

We need to stop blaming the President for an opposition that has gone off the deep end and would rather see the country disintegrate than to see him get any credit for stopping it.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.