Where Obama Went Wrong

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Instead of giving a bill of particulars, I'll boil it down to one thing.  It's not so much a particular place where he went wrong, but more about one vulnerability that has caught up with him time and again.  I think Obama himself is less skilled at crafting good policy and detailed negotiating than is needed in a president now.  He has had to farm too much of that work out to people on the Hill and his VP and cabinet and special crisis appointees.  Insofar as he has done that, he has actually fallen victim to their failings when things don't work out, and it's made him less persuasive at the negotiating table, with both Pubs and Dems, than he has been at the stump.  In that sense, I think the lack of legislative experience factor hurt him more in the long run than I believed it would in 2008.  All that being said, I think he has gotten an unfairly bad rap both from his own side of the aisle and from the opposition, and he will probably look better in the long run than in the stretches of a terribly bad fifth year of his term.  But, he just needed to be better at the nuts and bolts of governing than he was when he first ran.  I still would have favored him over Hillary in 2008 because I really didn't like where she was on the Iraq war.  But, all things considered, staying in the Senate for another term and a half and running in 2016 instead of 2008 might have prepared him a lot better for being president.

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There are all kinds of other things to blame for Obama's position right now other than him.  Dems are terrible campaigners on the whole, Pubs are totally myopic, and voters expect utopia yesterday, on top of which there are terrible things happening around the world that no president could control with the country in its current circumstances.  But this thread was about where Obama could have done things better. 

Most of the time, in public statements, it doesn't appear to me that Obama fails to project strength; he is a pretty cool customer and can either bat down or laugh off his opponents when needed.  Someone who wins two national elections, one against all the prevailing electoral trends and fighting against a legacy of national racism both times, doesn't have a problem with their image.  Obama is a little weak inside the negotiating room, not at the microphone.  And that, I suspect, comes down to his own expertise and confidence in what he is proposing.  Let me put it this way.  Someone who could really lay down the policy law would not have Harry Reid throwing his budget proposals in his office trash can on the eve of a government shutdown, and he would not have his opposition owning him on the public messaging of a heath care law whose substance was, except for the Medicaid expansion, of that very opposition's design.  When you know what all the cards in your hand are and know when others are bluffing, you usually end up with most of the chips, and the other players, however much they hate that, can't argue with it.  More experience would have done wonders for this problem, it would have made lots of things easier for him.

That having been said, I still prefer him to any of the people he ran against.