Posts tagged president
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The Obama Memos: The Making of a Post-Post-Partisan Presidency
Ryan Lizza from The New Yorker provides a unique and fascinating view of how decisions have been made inside the Obama presidency. This is essential reading for all those liberals who think Obama hasn’t done enough and for those conservatives who think he’s too radical. Lizza had access to hundreds of memoranda written inside the White House that provide insight on how Obama has adjusted his policies to meet political realities. The short version: It’s not as easy to get things done as you’d think, even less so when the opposition party is determined to stop you at every turn. Obama’s goal of changing Washington, D.C.’s toxic partisan atmosphere seems farther away than ever, but he has still had many significant accomplishments.
Yet the hundreds of pages of tax documents released by Mr. Romney’s campaign on Tuesday morning did not readily reveal any elaborate financial legerdemain or exotic tax shelters. What Mr. Romney’s returns illustrated, instead, was the array of perfectly ordinary ways in which the United States tax code confers advantages on the rich, allowing Mr. Romney to amass wealth under rules very different from those faced by most Americans who take home a paycheck.
Ask yourselves — where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the G.I. Bill. Where would we be if they hadn’t had that chance?
What [Drew] Westen seems to have wanted was the Democratic version of George W. Bush, contemptuous of his opponents, ruthless in his often unconstitutional determination to get his agenda through, divisive and polarizing. But Obama would not have won election on those grounds and did not have a mandate for that. He was elected as a moderate Democrat, prepared to engage any pragmatic solution to obvious problems, while not splitting an already polarized country even further.
(Source: andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
