At nearly every speech I give, someone asks about President Obama’s failure to lead. Of course, that question has been driven largely by the media, perhaps most by Bob Woodward. When Woodward speaks, Washington listens, and he has pushed the idea that Obama has failed in his fundamental leadership task–not building relationships with key congressional leaders the way Bill Clinton did, and not ‘working his will’ the way LBJ or Ronald Reagan did. Now, after the failure to get the background-check bill through the Senate, other reporters and columnists have picked up on the same theme, and I have grown increasingly frustrated with how the mythology of leadership has been spread in recent weeks. I have yelled at the television set, ‘Didn’t any of you ever read Richard Neustadt’s classic Presidential Leadership? Haven’t any of you taken Politics 101 and read about the limits of presidential power in a separation-of-powers system?’ But the issue goes beyond that, to a willful ignorance of history.
— Norm Ornstein, writing in National Journal.
Connect:
Every time I hear some pundit bemoan the fact that Obama is not being met by Congress like LBJ or Bill Clinton, I too want to yell at the radio, “Have you SEEN Obama? Does he look like a corn-fed Southern white guy to you?” This willful ignorance about not just history generally, but the role of race in particular, renders all these comparisons moot. LBJ and Clinton didn’t have to deal with racism. Period. End of stupid comparisons.