US Politics Opinion: A Look at Overrated Kennedy, Clinton the Master, and Obama Missing His Big Opportunity

Last month, on the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, I had a heretical thought: on 22 November 1963,  one of the country’s most ineffective Presidents was murdered. Accepting that he was in the job for less than three years, he still achieved little in terms of legislation. Kennedy was a smoke-and-mirrors man. It was Lyndon Johnson who got the job done.

Almost 50 years later, I am wondering if history is repeating itself. Oh, President Obama, what did you do yesterday? To use a soccer/football expression, you missed an open goal. You had your opponents at your mercy and let them off the hook. 

The day before the anniversary, the "Supercommittee", a special Congressional panel created to agree curbs on the national debt, conceded failure. In a joint statement, the Supercommittee’s Democratic and Republican leaders said that they were “deeply disappointed” by their inability to reach an agreement and that they hoped for progress in the months ahead. That could not conceal the reality: the nation's legislators had been unable to surmount ideological differences and stop the budgetary bleeding. 

A question: before the Supercommittee started its work, President Obama had put a fail-safe in place. If the committee failed to reach agreement, his default measures would reduce the deficit by billions of dollars, which he would protect by veto against any Congressional attack:

There will be no easy off-ramps on this one. We need to keep the pressure up to compromise, not turn off the pressure. The only way these spending cuts will not take place is if Congress gets back to work and agrees on a balanced plan to reduce the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion....They’ve still got a year to figure it out.

So why am I lamenting Obama’s performance instead of heaping praise on his foresight and firm language? Simple. He forgot politics. In less than a year, he will be in a Presidential election. America is as politically divided as it ever was between Left and Right; However, there is a huge bloc of votes in the middle, people who are not idealists and who feel comfortable in the political centre. It is this bloc which decides national elections.

Obama castigated the Republicans on the Supercommittee, but would it have killed him to deliver some bromides to the Democratic members as well? Surely they are at fault, too. The last Democrat who occupied the White House before Obama, the political wizard Bill Clinton, woud have done so. When Congress shut down the Federal government under his watch, he engaged in triangulation, positioning himself in the centre between warring factions of Democrats and Republicans. Two years after the Republicans had surged into control of Congress, Clinton breezed to victory in the 1996 presidential election.

Obama was given a heaven-sent opportunity to copy Clinton, but he threw it away. Where are his political antennae? Will he soon regret failing to take this chance?