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Obama's ten best, and ten worst, moves of the year revealed | The Politico web site has spoken to a dozen political insiders and pulled together a list of President Barack
Obama's ten best, and ten worst, moves of the year. The ten best moves are: 1.
Letting Congress take the lead on health care. Funny how times change. For most
of the year, this strategic decision looked destined for the "Worst" list. Town
hall screamers. Democratic infighting. Obama criticized for no plan of his own.
But with health care almost certain to pass, letting Congress take the lead, as
messy and painful as it was, is looking like a political winner for the president.
2. Picking Hillary Clinton for secretary of state - and not vice president. Clinton's
had a couple of stumbles on her current overseas trip, but overall, this remains
one of Obama's savviest moves. It serves a double purpose: it keeps her from serving
as an independent power center within the Democratic Party as a New York senator,
and it keeps a certain former president from wandering the West Wing. But Bill
Clinton's stature from wandering the world as a global do-gooder can't hurt. "The
same things that made Senator Clinton a complicated choice for vice president
made her an obvious and inspired choice for Secretary of State," said Democratic
strategist Steve McMahon. "Namely, the fact that President Clinton already has
such established relations with world leaders." 3. Passing the stimulus bill and
continuing bank bailouts Controversial, to be sure. But leading economists broadly
agree that these two mega-doses of taxpayer cash into the economy are pretty much
all that's holding the economy together right now. "On the domestic front, the
one two punch of financial stabilization and stimulus saved the economy from a
worsening recession," said former Bill Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. "Neither
was popular, but together they worked." The downside is that this gusher of cash
has galvanized Obama's opponents like almost nothing else he's done - as witnessed
by Tuesday's election results. Still, for now at least, stimulus and TARP look
like a win. 4. Nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court In Sotomayor, Obama
picked an eminently qualified jurist and disciplined nominee who thrilled the
liberal base and confounded his conservative opposition. He also helped solidify
the growing Hispanic vote for his party. At the height of the nomination fight,
former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich took to his Twitter feed to denounce
Sotomayor as a racist. Gingrich backed down, but Republicans will likely hear
the echo of little outburst in 2010 and 2012. 5. Taking out those pirates OK,
technically, credit should go to the U.S. Navy sharpshooters whose amazing precision
shots killed three of the pirates holding an American cargo ship captain hostage,
but Obama as commander in chief looked decisive for signing off on the mission.
Plus, imagine if it gone wrong - think Jimmy Carter and crashed helicopters in
the desert. 6. Sending Republican Utah Governor Jon Huntsman to China. The Mandarin-speaking
governor was a perfect fit for the U.S. ambassador's post. But more than that,
picking Huntsman sidelined a potentially formidable 2012 rival for the presidency,
who hasn't been heard from in Washington since he decamped for Beijing - exactly
what the White House wanted. 7. Firing GM CEO Rick Waggoner To satisfy the pitchfork
brigade, Obama needed to show that there are consequences for accepting taxpayer
bailouts, and Waggoner was the perfect candidate to shoulder the blame. Obama
probably wishes he had forced a few more CEOs to walk the plank, to counter a
public perception that failed bankers got off scot-free. 8. The Cairo speech Even
for a president who mastered the art of the mega-event on the campaign trail,
the sweep of his address to the world's one billion Muslims was ambitious. "America
is not - and never will be - at war with Islam," he said. "The speech in Cairo
was a high moment," said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile. "It signaled a shift."
Plus, the Egypt trip gave us the priceless images of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel
and Obama's personal aide Reggie Love riding camels at the pyramids. 9. Wooing
the media Obama's been on the cover of nearly every magazine in America, including
such non-political pubs as GQ, People, and Vibe. And he's impossible to miss on
TV: Here's Obama joking about being black with David Letterman. There's he's talking
Middle East policy on Al Arabiya. Now he's killing a fly with his bare hands on
CNBC. Obama's flood-the-zone strategy paid off as the media largely treated the
president with kid gloves all year. "I'm Barack Obama," he said at the White House
Correspondents Association dinner. "Most of you covered me. All of you voted for
me." 10. Beating up on FOX News There is nothing - nothing - so delicious to Obama's
liberal Democratic base than beating up on the network that's home to Glenn Beck,
Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. The Obama team's decision to call out Fox News
as "a wing of the Republican Party" was a brush-back pitch of sorts, warning the
rest of the media to stay away from Fox's more negative coverage. Ten Worst: 1.
Obama saying the Cambridge cops acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates.
As Obama took the side of an old friend against a police officer before he even
knew the details, he threw gasoline on simmering racial tensions left over from
his election. The White House's hastily cobbled together attempt at a solution
- the famous "beer summit" - is probably not what won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
2. Eight percent unemployment? No. If the stimulus was a good idea, touting the
stimulus too much was definitely not. Obama's advisers confidently predicted that
unemployment would top out at 8 percent if Congress went along with his push for
a $787 billion stimulus package. But unemployment hit 9.8 percent last month and
10 percent isn't far behind. The White House said that the economy was actually
much worse than the advisers would have known at the time. Still, they broke a
cardinal rule of politics - under-promise and over-deliver. 3. The Olympics bid
Copenhagen was not so wonderful to Barack Obama. More like the agony of defeat.
The trip gave fodder to the White House's critics to argue that the president
remains too close to his Windy City political base, and all the big city machine
seediness that implies. Not only that, Chicago's bid was bounced on a first ballot
- so much for the power of the global Brand Obama. 4. He's everywhere, all the
time The downside of the flood the zone media strategy, Obama runs the risk of
wearing thin on the American voter. "For awhile it looked like he would be on
everything from the Home and Garden Channel to Golf Digest," said Republican strategist
Ron Bonjean. "It dilutes the impact of his message and will begin to create voter
fatigue from seeing him too much." But the White House pushes back hard on this
theme - saying the constant stream of invites from Leno and Letterman and the
rest shows the public is still interested. 5. McChrystal outguns Obama These guys
don't get to be four-star generals without having a finely honed political sensibility,
but you'd think the president would be an even better pol than a general. First
Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's go-big troop request was leaked
to Bob Woodward - leaker unknown. Then McChrystal used a speech to a London think
tank to "pre-but" the case for a smaller force in Afghanistan. By going public
with his point of view, McChrystal handed Obama the untenable choice of defying
his political base or defying his top general in the field. 6. No earmarks? Well,
maybe just a few . . .billion Obama campaigned hard against earmarks, but in March,
he signed a $410 billion spending measure that was laden with more than $7 billion
worth of the targeted spending provisions anyway. The president called the bill
"imperfect" but didn't veto the measure, and sent an early signal that he would
bend - even on a core campaign priority. "He had an opportunity to really be different,"
said former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. "He could have dominated
and controlled Washington. But instead, he went along with it. Washington has
not changed." 7. No vetting the vetters From Tom Daschle's Town Cars, to Tim Geithner's
Turbo Tax to Bill Richardson's federal grand jury troubles, Obama aides early
in the year seemed incapable of turning up major problems before they hit the
papers. 8. Gitmo, Year Two Candidate Obama campaigned on closing the Guantanamo
Bay detention facility, so it seemed to make sense when he set a deadline of January
of 2010 to have the facility shuttered. By all accounts, it's not going to happen.
Obama and his team failed to take into account the extreme difficulty of deciding
what do with the prisoners there - Congress won't let them come to prisons here,
U.S. allies don't want them either. 9. Snubbing the Dalai Lama The White House
was at pains to say Obama didn't snub the Dalai Lama in October when the Tibetan
religious leader was in Washington - but it sure looked like he did. Obama's decision
not to meet with him in Washington - even though the White House promised another
meeting at a date to be named later - gave ammunition to his critics that Obama
was downplaying human rights to appease the Chinese. 10. Beating up on FOX News.
Obama ran as a post-partisan candidate who rejected the old ways of Washington.
But attacking the conservative network is just the sort of base building, red
vs. blue move Obama seemed to denounce during the campaign. Even some Democrats
were scratching their heads, saying it seemed beneath Obama to single out one
network - a far cry from the inspirational, bridge-building figure the nation
elected one year ago. |
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