Is Obama Still A Novice?

Irrespective of one's ideological orientation, a truly historic event took place in the US over the last couple of days. That event was the passage of a substantive health reform bill despite partisan divisions and with the conventional wisdom having been shown to be wrong again. While I have libertarian orientation, I was most displeased with the racist and obstructionist approach that replaced dispassionate analysis of the proposals of the bill. Having done some reading on history and political thinking, I thought that the socialist tag from partisans opposed to the bill was altogether cheap and dishonest.

The main part of this blog post however is to note a factor that many pundits and professionals fail to see about politics in general and the incumbent US president particularly. President Obama is a far more reflective and competent politician than his critics admit in their cynicism. Needless to mention, he got the stimulus package passed, accomplished a good record on economic management in a bad environment to get the markets up by a margin that is impressive and has now got his main domestic policy initiative passed. All this while many still consider him as a novice.

The more substantive issue is what this achievement means for President Obama's leadership. Daniel Gross summarizes the undeclared fact that it is dangerous to short Obama. His explanation for the reason that most of those who have questioned Obama's economic management capability have got it wrong comes from the composition of the self-selected crowd. And to an extent, most of them are Wall Street insiders and some corporate people who are known to have strong ideological orientation against state action but that does not work for positive political judgement. Judging from the group think that still dominates, I agree with Daniel Gross that this crowd has learnt little from this huge miss.