Failure to Lead

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"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

14th Amendment, U.S. Constitution
Section 4

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Yesterday, I was talking on Facebook with a fellow I have known since we were children in Arkansas. He still lives there. I do not.

I have been in the habit, from time to time, of posting links to politically oriented articles on Facebook. If you've been reading this blog regularly, you probably have a good idea what kind of links I've been posting.

My friend is an Obama defender (a rare breed in Arkansas), and I guess he's been feeling a bit put upon lately. (As you may have noticed, many Obama defenders have been on the defensive. Some feel Obama didn't receive enough credit for the mission that took out bin Laden. Others, no doubt, have felt that the debate over the debt ceiling undermined his authority.) He took exception to my posts.

Anyway, he remarked: "We get it. You don't like Obama."

That isn't really true. I don't have anything against the man personally. In fact, in an odd kind of way, I feel about him in much the same way I did about Ronald Reagan — on a personal, not political, level.

On that personal level, I liked Reagan. I rarely agreed with him on the issues, but I liked him personally. And, on that personal level, I like Barack Obama, too. I agree with his positions on issues more than I did Reagan, but I get frustrated at his insistence on not leading.

And I have been frustrated by Obama's supporters, who have frequently accused me of being a racist when the truth is that I have disagreed with the president — or criticized his failure to lead. I challenge anyone to cite a single example where I have said something that was racist.

A presidency is not, contrary to what Karl Rove once suggested, about with whom you would rather share a beer. (OK, maybe some people treat it that way, but I don't.) When I vote in a presidential election, I am not picking a drinking buddy. I am picking the person I want to lead my country in the next four years.

And even if I don't vote for the candidate who wins (and that has happened much too frequently in my life), I still expect the winner to lead. I may not like the direction, but at least I have a clear idea where we're going.

I prefer that to a rudderless ship of state.

Obama appears to want to run for re–election on his terms. He wants to be the outsider he was in 2008, free to criticize policy. But he isn't an outsider anymore. He is an incumbent and, as such, he is part of the process now.

The policies are his.

With outsiders, voters can only rely upon their gut instincts about whether the candidate would have what it takes to lead a nation of more than 300 million people. It is mostly hypothetical.

With incumbents, voters have had many opportunities to see for themselves. It is not hypothetical.

I suppose that, because of Obama's twin messages of hope and change, a majority of voters in 2008 believed he possessed those leadership qualities, that he had a definite idea where he wanted to take America. I never felt that way. I don't know why. It was my gut reaction.

I didn't vote for Obama in 2008 (actually, I voted for Ralph Nader), but if he showed even the slightest inclination toward leadership, I would consider voting for him in 2012. To date, he has not.

And that was the gist of my response to my friend.

I didn't want to say that I think Obama is a likable guy — because that isn't what the presidency is about to me. Obama's likability is not relevant to whether he can do the job.

I think it is important to like the president, but that is secondary to someone who has the courage to stand for what he believes is best for the nation.

"He isn't leading, Paul," I replied.

Paul's response? "I figure it's pretty difficult to lead a bunch of spoiled petulant whiney–assed teabaggers who operate under a 'Scorched Earth' policy. S&P stated that it appeared that the Bush II tax cuts would not expire, therefore no increased revenue. There's only so much that can be cut from a budget."

I replied that Obama could have invoked the Fourteenth Amendment.

When most people speak of the Fourteenth Amendment, they do so in the context of its provisions for citizenship, due process and equal protection, which are important, to be sure, but the amendment also addresses the subject of public debt. It was a little–known provision of the amendment until recently.

Legal scholars disagree over the powers that the amendment gives to the president. Some have said that it gives the president the authority to raise or ignore the debt ceiling and that, if challenged in court, the ruling likely would be in the president's favor — if the court agreed to hear it at all.

Others have said the amendment does not give such power to the chief executive.

In the legal community, it is seen as an unresolved issue.

Seems to me the debt ceiling debate of 2011 would have been a good time to test it — since it has never been tested before. Both sides mentioned during that debate how many times presidents from both parties had sought to raise the debt ceiling.

I figured this would be a good time to settle it — hopefully, once and for all.

But this was Paul's response: "Congress would promptly draw up impreachment papers."

"On what grounds?" I asked.

"They'd think of something," he replied.

Ah, yes, the infamous "they." Nearly every president in my memory — and/or his defenders/supporters — has fallen back on that one, in one way or another. They are always engaged in some kind of conspiracy against the incumbent.

Richard Nixon probably was the best at that claim. He always believed someone was out to get him — which may or may not have been true. But most of his predecessors have come to believe something similar.

I guess it is a natural progression for a president, often isolated in the White House, from the adulation of the campaign trail to a feeling of persecution once in office.

But a president's supporters are not isolated. They're outside the Beltway where they can see the effects of public policy on their friends, neighbors, co–workers (if they still have their jobs).

My friend's recitation of the company line suggests to me that Obama's failure to lead is beginning to wear on his supporters, and that does not augur well for his re–election campaign, no matter how much money he has raised.

I get the sense that Obama's supporters are becoming demoralized

I had to ask my friend, "Is fear of impeachment a valid excuse for a president not to lead?" He didn't reply.

Is leadership really that important? Well, it's definitely a component of job approval, and that, I believe, is a key figure, one that a president who is seeking a second term ignores at his peril. It addresses the general feeling people have about their president — and, with the exception of the brief bounce he experienced after the killing of bin Laden in early May, Obama's approval rating has languished in the 40s almost nonstop for two years.

At a comparable point in his first term, George W. Bush enjoyed approval ratings in the 50s.

President Clinton's approval ratings, like Obama's, were in the 40s in his third year in office. He went on to win a second term, the only Democrat to do so since FDR, so he is something of a motivational figure for this White House — but there were some important differences.

In 1995, Clinton's approval numbers were slowly beginning to move in an upward trajectory — and he achieved it largely because he demonstrated presidential leadership in the face of a Congress in which both chambers were controlled by the opposition party — which was every bit as committed to removing Clinton from office then as it is to removing Obama today.

Clinton, of course, eventually faced impeachment proceedings — which may be the reason my friend is skittish about impeachment, but he needn't be. Democrats hold the majority in the Senate, which would have to convict for the president to be removed from office. Two–thirds of the Senate would have to vote for conviction, and I don't think that is likely to happen with this Senate and this president.

Maybe my friend is concerned about the prospect of the executive branch of government being preoccupied with impeachment proceedings during an election year, and the Clinton experience is fresh in his mind. I suppose that is a legitimate fear — but there is more for Obama to learn from the Clinton presidency.

Clinton knew the importance of leadership. Maybe it was his extensive experience as a state governor, experience that Obama did not bring with him to the West Wing.

Clinton said he would not have hesitated to invoke the 14th Amendment, and I think its application would have shown, at the very least, that this president is engaged, that he is thinking beyond the next election and is concerned with how he can leave the presidency better than he found it.

And sparing future presidents the ordeal to which the debt ceiling debate — and the subsequent lowering of the national credit rating — subjected the White House and the American people is a good way to do that.

Instead, I have heard more and more people lamenting the absence of leadership in this White House. That affects a president's job approval — which will, in turn, affect his vote totals.

I ask again — "Is fear of impeachment a valid excuse for a president not to lead?"

Mixed Signals

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"Campaigning in last year's midterm elections, Obama argued over and over again that Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch; from now going forward, the question will be why he hasn't towed it out."

Karen Tumulty
Washington Post
Aug. 5, 2011

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It was almost predictable — except that things are so darn unpredictable these days.

About the only thing that seemed to be predictable last week was the weather — here in north Texas, we're in a potentially record–setting stretch of consecutive 100–degree days.

First the debt ceiling went down to the wire — which a lot of people were predicting. Then the overseas markets began some scary gyrations that spooked the American markets on the eve of the July jobs report. Fewer people were predicting that.

The signals just prior to the jobs report were not promising, and people were understandably nervous about what would happen on Friday, when the report came out and the markets began reacting to it.

Well, the jobs report was better than expected, and stocks got an early bounce from the news — but then things settled into a rocky pattern that capped a volatile week on Wall Street. I guess some people understood that, while it was better than expected, the jobs gains were still far short of what is needed to get the economy on a sound footing.

(Of course, it depends on who is doing the spinning. Democrats are likely to point out that jobs have been added to the economy in each of the last 10 months, which is true. But in most of those months, including the most recent one, the gains weren't even close to what the economy needs to average for several years.

(And Republicans are likely to overlook their prominent role in the making of this economic crisis — and act as if the president is solely to blame.

(Politicians like to blame their rivals for things. It reminds me of a comedy album in the 1970s in which a comedian mimicked an embattled Richard Nixon telling the nation that he was taking full responsibility for the Watergate scandal — but not the blame.

("Let me explain the difference," the comedian/Nixon said. "People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are responsible do not.")

And then S&P lowered the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. It's a kind of economic probation, I have heard economic experts say — potentially reversible but only if the U.S. government cleans up its act.

As polarized as the federal government is today, I don't have a lot of hope for that one. It seems to me that what is really needed is presidential leadership. It has been sorely lacking.

Some people disagree with me, and that is fine, but the fact remains that unemployment is higher now than it was when the president took office — and that is what many voters see when they look at this administration's economic record.

I have heard some Obama defenders speak with satisfaction of the recent jobs gains — but the raw numbers say that the unemployment rate went down by the same amount — 0.1% — that it went up the previous month. No real ground has been gained by the economy this summer.

In fact, the decline in the credit rating suggests the opposite. But who knows?

Not much is clear to anyone, least of all the ordinary citizens — especially the ones who have been out of work and just want to be self sufficient, to have at least part of their lives back. They don't care about global politics and foreign economies, but their lives are being affected by them, anyway.

They are the ones for whom leadership is most important right now.

David Gergen knows something about presidential leadership. He worked with four presidents, and he shares, at CNN.com, his thoughts following a recent visit to London, where he saw the Churchill War Rooms.

"On both sides of the Atlantic," he writes, "the turmoil of this past week has sparked cries for those in political power to step up and for God's sake, lead."

His visit to the Churchill War Rooms convinced him that a Churchill is what is needed here.

Churchill's times were uncertain as well, Gergen points out, but he set clear goals and led the march, even if he was marching into a murky future.

"On several walls hang posters from those days: 'Keep Calm & Carry On.' That is very much the spirit that leaders of today need to instill in peoples across the Atlantic," Gergen writes. "They must replace fear with faith in the future."

If that happens, maybe the signals won't seem as mixed.

A 'Rendezvous With Destiny'

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In the weeks before Barack Obama took the oath of office 2½ years ago, lots of folks were already comparing him to Lincoln and FDR.

Lincoln, as the Great Emancipator, was an obvious one, I guess, considering that Obama was the first black president. Obama's elevation to the presidency could be seen — and, in fact, was seen by some — as the fruition of Lincoln's vision of a post–racial America.

But I always felt the comparison to Roosevelt was more appropriate because of the circumstances and the expectations — OK, maybe I was influenced by the fact that I once wrote a research paper in graduate school on the 1932 presidential election, in which FDR first won the presidency (denying Herbert Hoover a second term by a substantial margin).

I still say the circumstances — which most people readily acknowledged were the worst since Roosevelt's time — had a lot to do with that. It's been nearly 80 years since Roosevelt was elected president, and the economic disaster that contributed much to Obama's election clearly wasn't as severe as the one facing FDR — but it was the worst this country has faced in three–quarters of a century, and that is important to remember.

In 2008, America already was, for all intents and purposes, a post–racial society. Racism still existed, but not on an officially sanctioned level, as it did when schools and public restrooms and businesses of all kinds were segregated.

And organized racism (i.e., the Ku Klux Klan) was not practiced at the level it once was, thanks to laws that were not only enacted but actively enforced.

Discrimination was outlawed, which, it seems to me, is the kind of thing that can only be taken so far as long as it is pursued as vigorously as other crimes.

If, for example, an employer is predisposed not to hire people who belong to a certain race — or, for that matter, happen to be female or over a certain age — it probably would be the kind of thing that would be hard to prove in court without some sort of paper trail. If one exists, it is government's responsibility to prosecute.

I'm sure discrimination still happens, but it's more covert. Folks who discriminate make more of an effort to cover their tracks. Most don't say or do incriminating things indiscriminately.

The election of Obama had no discernible impact on unsanctioned discrimination, but that wasn't really what the campaign was about. Sure, many folks were motivated by a desire to show the world that America had transcended racism, but I think a lot of it had to do with the economy.

It was what Americans have always done.

The bad economy affected everyone — and, as a student of history, I can tell you that, when times are bad, voters need very little encouragement to turn to the party that is out of power.

In 2008, the Republicans held the presidency. There was no incumbent to punish, as there had been in 1932, but the public could hold his party accountable — and it did. The voters gave the Democrats the White House and padded their majorities in the House and Senate.

I believed then — and I believe now — that the Democratic nominee was virtually assured of victory after the economy imploded under a Republican president. If Hillary Clinton had been the nominee, she would have won. If John Edwards had been the nominee, he would have won (and, considering the things that have emerged about him, we might well have faced other issues as a result).

As I say, this is how it has always been in America. When the economy is bad, the voters turn against the party in the White House. Doesn't matter who is in charge in Congress — which is never popular, anyway. Economic policy is believed to be set by the president.

Sure, we've had other economic downturns in the last three–quarters of a century — some modest and short lived, some not so modest and longer lived — but presidents who survived and were rewarded with additional time were the ones who demonstrated leadership and confidence.

They were the ones who met their "rendezvous with destiny," as FDR put it in his acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic National Convention. Roosevelt was wrapping up his first term in the White House and was asking for four more years.

The unemployment rate in 1936 was much worse than it is today — but it was a clear improvement over the conditions that prevailed when Roosevelt was first elected. People responded to that fact — as well as the fact that Roosevelt had shown an eagerness to try new things when other approaches weren't getting the desired effect.

It's called leadership. It is the pioneering spirit that has always been celebrated in American history.

In the aftermath of the congressional resolution of the debt ceiling crisis, one got the sense from Obama that we had dodged a bullet, not that an important step had been taken toward the fulfillment of his vision of economic recovery and progress.

He hasn't shown the same kind of eagerness to try new things when the old ones did not succeed. Instead, he has been like George W. Bush, unable (or unwilling) to admit to any mistakes and, consequently, learn from them.

He must have made some mistakes. Under Obama's watch, unemployment has never been below where it was on the day he was sworn in. in 2½ years, voters expect to see some improvement.

Yet, on this Friday, roughly 15 months before Obama must face the voters again, forecasters believe the unemployment rate will remain at 9.2%.

In the context of the times, that would have been considered amazing when FDR sought a second term — and might have led to a 50–state landslide. As it was, Roosevelt carried all but two states and received more than 60% of the vote.

But, in 2011, to many voters, it represents a retreat if not outright surrender. Even the most generous voters seem hard pressed to defend these numbers, which directly threaten everything else.

It's why the stock markets have been jittery. It's why creditors have put the United States on a form of economic probation, even though an agreement was reached on the debt ceiling.

What has Obama — who likes to talk about "teachable moments" — learned from his mistakes? Is he meeting his rendezvous with destiny?

Prosperity Is Just Around the Corner

I am a concerned American.

I am concerned for many reasons, and I have been concerned for a long time. The debt ceiling crisis that is consuming so much time and energy is an additional concern that no one really needs.

I know I don't need it. It's just more stress for me.

That stress level wasn't eased by the tenor of the debate over the debt ceiling that played out on TV tonight.

Now, if you read this blog on even a semi–regular basis, you know that I don't always agree with Barack Obama. In fact, I have frequently disagreed with him — and, although you may not realize it, that is a source of considerable anxiety for me.

I have struggled with this because, as I have said before, I was brought up by parents who were Democrats. And there have been times when I have given this president the benefit of the doubt — in no small part because I understand, at least instinctively, his objective.

But I have had nagging doubts about his leadership from the start — and much of it, I think, has stemmed from the fact that Obama doesn't stay focused on anything for very long. Sometimes, I have wondered if he has undiagnosed attention deficit disorder.

For awhile, I felt my doubts might have been misplaced. Obama came into office and made what appeared to be bold moves that were designed to put people back to work and really fix the economy.

But that is what was misleading.

It wasn't long before his focus shifted to other things — and, ever since, I have felt increasingly uneasy about the way that Obama and his followers rely on racism and Republican obstructionism as excuses for why they can't do things.

They get mired in the blame game, and they whine about the rigidity of the opposition. They act as if this is something new in American politics, but it isn't.

I'll admit that the opposition to Obama is more extreme, more polarized than ever before in my experience — just as his support is more polarized in the other direction. Obviously, it is more difficult to bring these two sides together than ever before.

But that is not an excuse.

Successful presidents learn to use the "bully pulpit," as Teddy Roosevelt called it. Mobilizing public opinion — in fact, using it pre–emptively — is a big part of presidential leadership.

Obama and his supporters have been correct when they have pointed out that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all lobbied for — and got — higher debt ceilings. They understood how critical it was for a president to mobilize public opinion if he was going to come out ahead in any significant negotiation.

To mobilize the public, a president must empathize with people's problems — "feel their pain," in Clinton's words — and that has been a problem for Obama. Do you recall the exchange last year between Obama and the middle–class black woman who told him, at a town meeting, that she was worn out defending him while she saw her standard of living deteriorate?

Obama used the opportunity to polish his campaign pitch, spoke of achievements that had no real bearing on the woman's situation as she had described it (but would clearly appeal to select segments of the electorate) and wrapped up his answer with a Reaganesque "stay the course" message.

He never thanked that woman for her support nor did he ask her any questions that were intended to find out more about her situation so he could address issues that directly affected her. In fact, he showed very little interest in her concerns. He was far more interested in promoting what he saw as his administration's achievements — perhaps with an eye to the approaching midterms but almost certainly with his re–election bid (which he announced about six months later) in mind.

"Stay the course" doesn't tend to mean much to people who have been out of work for a year or more and can't see any improvement that affects them. It tends to sound like "Prosperity is just around the corner."

The case for that — and a lot of other things — would be better if Obama had shown himself to be a better negotiator, but he hasn't. He is almost always reactive, not proactive.

That isn't leadership, and it's been an issue on just about every domestic and international matter that has come up in this president's term.

But, in the interest of brevity, let's just look at the debate on the debt ceiling for a minute.

When Obama agreed to the extension of the Bush tax cuts last year, why didn't he do so on the condition that the debt ceiling would be raised at the same time?

I've heard Obama supporters argue (and justifiably) that the Bush tax cuts expanded the deficit considerably. Republicans wanted those tax cuts, though, and my guess is they would have been willing to make a deal.

The time to cut such a deal passed long ago, though. I don't know why, but, like most of the opportunities that were presented to Obama and the Democrat–controlled Congress in 2009 and 2010, it was allowed to slip away.

It remains to be seen whether the two sides can work out a deal in a week.

Frankly, it's more drama than I need right now.

The Vision Thing

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"Oh, the vision thing."

George H.W. Bush

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In the waning days of the 2010 midterm campaign, I found myself thinking a lot about Barack Obama's insistence that there was nothing wrong with the message, it just hadn't been conveyed properly.

Well, it seems the voters, in that time–honored way, shot the messenger. But was it fatal? Or was it, in the words of the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," merely a flesh wound?

From what I could see, the voters agree with Obama about many of the things that need to be done. But they elect presidents to make often painful choices between what absolutely positively must be done and what needs to be done but can be put on the back burner.

They did not believe that Obama has been making those tough choices so they tried to get his attention in the only way they could.

The resounding message from the voters on Nov. 2 was not that they had experienced a change of heart about Republican government. They are still wary of the Republican Party, still inclined to blame it for the policies that they believe contributed heavily to the economic mess we face today, and they are particularly concerned about its members who ran as Tea Partiers.

But they were willing to put all that to one side in this election and deliver an urgent message of their own to the Democrats.

The number of voters who told exit pollsters that jobs led their lists of concerns dwarfed everything else — health care, the environment, you name it. And those voters want to see improvement in that area.

Their message was clear — their expectations aren't being met.

What this means for the future of the Obama presidency is not immediately clear. I suspect much will depend upon what Obama does in the next couple of years. He must be a leader. He must bring diverse people together.

He will have to do things he has not had to do up to this point in his life — not just his political life but his life in general.

But Democrats in the House should have taken a long, hard, critical look at the leadership record of Nancy Pelosi.

The electoral defeat, the loss of control of the House was as much Pelosi's failure as Obama's. Yes, Obama is the president, the leader of his party. His support appears to have meant very little for embattled Democrats across the nation, and the Republicans' midterm triumphs are being interpreted as a rejection of Obama's leadership. Certainly, he deserves his share of the blame.

But a loss of this magnitude reflects poorly on the speaker, perhaps more than it does on the president. The president is the head of the executive branch of government; the speaker is the most visible leader of half of the legislative branch.

These were her people who got swept away in the Republican tsunami. Any serious evaluation of the reasons for this defeat must reach the conclusion that Pelosi failed to adequately defend her colleagues — and that is why her retention in a leadership role is so bewildering.

If I had been asked before the election, I would have said that no House speaker who presided over the loss of more than 60 seats in a single election would be kept in a leadership position.

I would have said that, it seems to me, the logical thing for a devastated party to do is seek new blood to lead it.

In fact, if it had been up to me, I would have chosen North Carolina's Heath Shuler over Pelosi.

Shuler, as you may know, spent a few years playing pro football, but he retired after injuring his foot, completed his degree work at the University of Tennessee (where he had been runnerup for the Heisman Trophy) and embarked on a new career in real estate. He was elected to the House in 2006, defeating an eight–term Republican incumbent in a traditionally Republican district.

Anyway, Shuler challenged Pelosi for minority leader and was defeated. The newspaper in the largest city in Shuler's district, the Asheville Citizen–Times, and its readers were not impressed. Leroy Goldman called Shuler's bid for the leadership role a "stunt," and Angela Leonard wrote in a letter to the editor that Shuler should go ahead and join the Republican Party.

Once again, a centrist takes the blunt of the punishment for the extremists' failures.

Pelosi has been speaker since Shuler came to Washington in 2007. In Pelosi's first election after becoming speaker, Democrats enjoyed gains that were primarily due to one of two things — the presence of Obama at the top of the ticket or the presence of George W. Bush in the White House for the previous eight years.

What happened in that election had little, if anything, to do with Pelosi.

But the 2010 election results had Pelosi's fingerprints all over them. She's a polarizing figure, and Republicans capitalized on that in advertisements from coast to coast.

Yes, it is true that this election was, in part, a referendum on Obama. But let's be clear here. They've been conducting presidential approval surveys going back to FDR's days, and what happened to Obama is nothing new in the American experience. It was a little more extreme than most, not new.

But there are certain warning signs Obama should heed as he prepares for his re–election campaign. When I see things like surveys that report that 42% of people under the age of 30 are familiar with the operating system for Google's smartphones but only 14% know who the speaker of the House will be in the next Congress — I have serious doubts about the stability of Obama's 2008 coalition.

That isn't an indictment of young voters only. It seems to me that more members of every demographic group could correctly identify some product than the incoming speaker of the House — and that isn't a very good commentary on the culture in general.

But, frankly, I find it hard to understand why a House speaker whose party has just lost more than five dozen seats, many in Midwestern states that are expected to play pivotal roles in the next presidential election, should be retained as her party's leader. Haven't congressional leaders been toppled for losing much less?

That, certainly, is what recent history has told us. Newt Gingrich, after all, lost his leadership role when the Republicans lost only a handful of seats after the 1998 midterms — but they had been expected to gain ground with Bill Clinton facing impeachment proceedings. I always felt Gingrich was ousted more out of disappointment than anything else.

Gingrich's successor, Dennis Hastert, remained in the House after Democrats reclaimed control of that chamber in 2006, but he did not seek a minority leadership role and retired two years later.

And the last Democratic House speaker before Pelosi, Tom Foley, went down in the Republican tidal wave of 1994. Would he have remained as minority leader if he had not been narrowly rejected? I doubt it.

Pelosi's main argument in favor of her retention seems to be the devout belief that, had it not been for whatever role she may have played in making the tough choices about which Democrats to throw under the bus so they could reallocate electoral resources from what had come to be seen as lost causes, the 2010 midterms would have been much, much worse.

Has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? It certainly is an odd yardstick for success — "Things could have been worse ..." — but the White House uses it. We'll see how it works out in two years.

Actually, by choosing to keep Pelosi in a leadership position, Democrats seem to be taking their cue from the last time a party lost as many seats in the House as Pelosi's did. It was 62 years ago, when Joe Martin's Republicans lost more than 70 seats after controlling both chambers of Congress for two years.

The House speaker couldn't really take the rap on that one, though. It was a presidential election year, and Democratic President Harry Truman pulled off an unexpected victory over Tom Dewey. In the process, he swept some Democrats into office along with him.

Martin may have shared some of the responsibility for the 1948 losses, but most of it surely belongs with Dewey, the party's titular leader as its presidential nominee.

Martin was retained by the Republicans as minority leader. Then, a few years later, he was restored as speaker of the House when Republicans rode the popularity of Dwight Eisenhower back into congressional power. But they collapsed in the 1954 midterms and remained the minority party for the next 40 years.

So the back–to–the–future example of Martin and the Republicans of 1948 might not be the best one for Democrats to emulate — although, two years ago, I did write about speculation that Obama was following Eisenhower's lead.

If he was, somehow he must have wandered off the path — because, although Ike's Republicans, like Obama's Democrats, were reduced to minority status in the House in the midterm elections, Eisenhower's popularity rating always was greater than his disapproval rating. The same clearly cannot be said for Obama.

I guess, though, it's always possible that Obama knows what he is doing and, in time, he will be vindicated.

Call it that vision thing.

What Would T.R. Have Done?

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President McKinley is shot on Sept. 6, 1901.

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Much has been said and written in this campaign about John McCain's admiration for Theodore Roosevelt.

It has been said many times that McCain is a maverick in the mold of T.R. And, if one aspires to be president, there were few presidents who have been more worthy of admiration or emulation than Theodore Roosevelt.

Today, the day after the Labor Department reported that unemployment in the United States is at its highest level in five years, it's appropriate that our thoughts should turn to Roosevelt.

It was on this day, in 1901, that President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, N.Y. He lingered for about a week, then died on Sept. 14, 1901. His vice president was Theodore Roosevelt.

As president, Roosevelt compiled a record that was progressive, promising a "square deal" to the working man and giving his support to labor unions.

Almost precisely two years to the day after McKinley was shot, on Sept. 7, 1903, Roosevelt summed up his feelings in his "Square Deal" speech to the New York State Agricultural Association in Syracuse, N.Y., saying, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."

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The drumbeat of monthly job losses has lifted the unemployment rate by 1.3 percentage points in the past six months — an extraordinarily rapid rise that economists say is a strong signal of recession. The last time joblessness rose so fast was in 1993 during the 'jobless recovery' from the 1990-1991 recession.

Washington Times

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He demonstrated his maverick streak in other ways, too — by promoting conservation and by opposing corruption and illegal practices.

McCain displayed more of a maverick streak when he ran for president in 2000 than he has in 2008.

But this is an opportunity for him to show the same spirit he showed when it looked like Hurricane Gustav might hand New Orleans a Katrina-like blow.

With the Republican convention only hours from being gaveled to order, McCain called for bipartisanship in handling the aftermath of a hurricane. He told Republicans that this was the time to "take off your Republican hats and put on your American hats."

That kind of spirit is needed now. But this time the target audience is much larger. This crisis is more widespread. It doesn't affect only the people along the Gulf coast. The effects of the job losses can be felt in every state.

Job losses across the board were one-fifth higher than projected in August, and losses for June and July were revised upward as well. It is no longer a matter of being able to pay high prices. Now, there is no income in thousands of households where there was an income only a few days or weeks ago.

If a candidate has a good idea for turning things around, he doesn't need to sit on it until after the election so his party will get the credit when it "comes to the rescue" (but is spared having to face the electoral consequences if it doesn't work). It doesn't matter which side gets the credit. If it can help to reverse the economic tide, it will benefit everyone.

And the Washington Times reports that jobs are becoming more scarce as more people enter the job market.

It would be nice to see some presidential leadership.