FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Obama needs to perform a U-turn

Another educator states what I have been saying for a while now...the biggest task Obama has is educating the public- about the game that is getting played and the rules that are being set.

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Obama needs to perform a U-turn: "This has been a ghastly 12 months for President Barack Obama. As he prepares to deliver his first State of the Union address, none of the fair promises of his November 2008 victory has been fulfilled. The question now being asked, very properly, is whether he can recover in the next nine months, rescuing his Democratic party from catastrophic Senate and House losses in the mid-term elections. Even more importantly, will it be possible for him to proceed to win a second term for himself in 2012? The tasks are Herculean, though they might not have proved daunting for either of Mr Obama’s most distinguished 20th-century Democratic presidential predecessors, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman...

Mr Obama desperately needs to make a U-turn, and to do so gracefully, deliberately and without rancour. He would do well to begin by seeing the congressional Republicans for what they are, commonplace politicians scarcely redolent of those who graced the GOP opposition in the days of Roosevelt and Truman. One does not need to make heroes of men such as Nelson Rockefeller and later east coast, midwestern and western Republicans who resembled him to say that today’s predominantly southern contingent evokes no memory of them. Mr Obama must stop seeking photo-opportunities with the likes of former president George W. Bush, remembering what he so recently thought of him and those others who served for eight years in an administration he once knew to be disastrous....

Mr Obama is well aware of the difficulties of his task, erasing memories of this last unfortunate year and of much that came before. He can do this best by making clear that his political agenda is not intended to take the country back to some mythical past hallowed by memory, but is instead calculated to bring it forward to a time of innovation and change, of greater social justice and international peace. He cannot pretend that he will resolve the grave and continuing problems of unemployment in a year or two; Roosevelt never achieved that either. But Mr Obama can legitimately recall all that a succession of 20th-century Democratic administrations did to lead the country out of economic stagnation, to give it hope and moral strength....