I Do Find, More and More, Increasing Evidence That Barack Obama Does Not Understand What His Job Is...
His job is not to hang Larry Summers out in public for two months as a Fed Chair nominee unless he has--personally, personally--had the conversations with Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and Jeff Merkley on the Senate Banking Committee and saying: "I may well decide that this is who I need at the Fed for me to sleep more easily and be less stressed: I need him, and your beefs with him are really beefs with me, and you should take them out not on him but on me."
And his job is not to fail to call Bill Clinton for the first two years of his presidency.
A President is not a powerful person who can do what he likes, but a person under immense pressures who has no moral choice but to do what he must. Coalition maintenance--keeping everybody in harness, energized, and pulling in the same direction--is the job.
Donovan Slack: Former aide sorry for dissing Obama:
Former Obama aide Neera Tanden took to Twitter on Tuesday to apologize for some choice words she uttered about her former boss. In an interview with New York magazine published on Sunday, Tanden had been trying to explain why Obama didn't call former President Bill Clinton for the first two years of his administration…. Tanden, now president of the Center for American Progress, suggested in her mea culpa that it was a poor choice of words. "I was trying to say how President Obama, who I admire greatly, is a private person, but I deeply regret how I said it. I apologize," she wrote….
Clinton has been stumping hard for Obama, attending campaign fundraisers and rallies and appearing in a direct-to-camera ad. And while the renewed relations -- genuine or not -- have widely been a plus for the president's reelection effort, they have also helped reinvigorate Clinton -- or as Tanden noted in the New York interview, they've "made Bill Clinton the king of the world.”
