Editorial in the LA Times: Obama ... The Pragmatic President
As President Obama's second year in office comes to an end, a bitter battle is underway among Democrats over whether he has broken his promises and sold out his principles, or merely made the kind of rational compromises that prudent leaders are required to make. Hurt, betrayed and surprised, some of his original supporters are now deriding him as spineless and weak, while others insist that his tactics allowed him to achieve all he possibly could have in today's partisan political environment.
Passions are running high. Should he have held out indefinitely for the public option during the struggle for healthcare reform, or was he right to compromise in hopes of passing a bipartisan bill? Given his campaign promise to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison within one year, how could he have allowed Congress to thwart him so easily? In the recent lame-duck session, should he have let the Bush-era tax cuts expire entirely rather than allow them to be extended for people who earn more than $250,000 a year?
At its core, this is one of the oldest battles in the history of politics. Tensions between moderates and radicals, between pragmatists and purists, between gradualists and those who are unwilling to wait for change are an integral part of the democratic process going back to classical Athens and Rome. Whether a politician should stand firm for what he or she believes in or cut deals in order to lock in partial gains is both a moral question and a tactical one on which it is unlikely that everyone will agree.
It was certainly a familiar dilemma to Abraham Lincoln...
Read entire article at LA Times
Passions are running high. Should he have held out indefinitely for the public option during the struggle for healthcare reform, or was he right to compromise in hopes of passing a bipartisan bill? Given his campaign promise to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison within one year, how could he have allowed Congress to thwart him so easily? In the recent lame-duck session, should he have let the Bush-era tax cuts expire entirely rather than allow them to be extended for people who earn more than $250,000 a year?
At its core, this is one of the oldest battles in the history of politics. Tensions between moderates and radicals, between pragmatists and purists, between gradualists and those who are unwilling to wait for change are an integral part of the democratic process going back to classical Athens and Rome. Whether a politician should stand firm for what he or she believes in or cut deals in order to lock in partial gains is both a moral question and a tactical one on which it is unlikely that everyone will agree.
It was certainly a familiar dilemma to Abraham Lincoln...