Every successful president compromises. Even the men whose images we print on our currency and whose ideals we teach to schoolchildren understood when political reality and real leadership dictated deal-making. Unfortunately this notion seems completely lost on the current occupant of the Oval Office.
On Thursday, President Obama again reiterated not only a refusal to compromise, but also a refusal even to negotiate seriously.
He staged a public event in which he insulted his counterpart in negotiations, House Speaker John Boehner, and said Boehner was in thrall of “extremists” who had a peculiar “obsession” with ObamaCare.
This was not what was needed from a leader amid a country in a government slimdown and possibly facing temporary debt default later this month.
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Obama still could have learned, in nearly six years as president, that leadership requires compromise.
He also could have taken the unsubtle hint Bill Clinton gave him in re-nominating Obama at the 2012 Democratic Convention.
In a speech that had appropriately partisan red meat for the occasion Clinton nonetheless stressed: “the politics of constant conflict may be good, but what is good politics does not necessarily work in the real world. What works in the real world is cooperation.”
Clinton probably privately grasps what Obama evidently does not: that ObamaCare is unpopular with voters, as is unsustainable deficit spending. That is why voters elected a Republican House of Representatives in 2010 and 2012, and why some compromise by each party in our divided government is now necessary.
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Obama’s country needs him to be a leader now -- not a campaigner. Instead, he says imperiously there will be no compromise on his unpopular healthcare law and no negotiations over his demand for the ability to rack up more debt.
Unfortunately for Obama, the lore of government shutdowns as told in Washington is looking more and more suspect.
The lore has held that Republicans, who supposedly lost the government shutdown fights of the mid-1990s, will always lose them to a president who has the bigger bully pulpit. But as with phony doom-and-gloom predictions about sequester budget cuts, this may turn out to be another Washington truism that just isn’t true.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/04/obama-needs-to-park-campaign-bus-and-lead/Obama stays in campaign mode because it's the only thing he knows how to do.
