Another Opportunity to Govern (updated)

In September, President Obama took an opportunity to become the President of all the people and left it on the table. My hopes and assessment here found him wanting. He now has two new things going for him:

First, a message from Massachusetts that we expect him to deliver on that promise and

Second, the President gets to give a State of the Union every year.

Almost five months after his famous healthcare (they lie, you lie) speech he gets to stand in front of the American people and explain, once again, how he is going to move his number one campaign promise forward, changing how we govern in Washington.

The hysteria of the last week marked by accusations of all kind of things: weakness by Democrats, Republican nihilism, the Democrats using the election of Scott Brown as an excuse to get out of an unpopular vote, etc. misses the whole point, again. Or, from the link:

He won by a nice majority because almost all of the moderates/independents in this country believed he would bring civility to governance.

The disappointment on the left is that he does occasionally try to do that, so far. In the middle, well, they are starting to believe it less and less.

His policies did not win him the election. Healthcare with a public option didn’t win it. Iraq was almost a non issue by election day. He won it on the faith people had in his desire to change politics as usual. That is the issue in this debate worth fighting for.

President Obama needs to lead the discussion by passing a full olive branch across the aisle. If he invokes the same partisan mantra that “every bad thing happened before he was President and it will take time to fix it”, followed by the accusation that “the Republicans are being obstructionist by wanting to just slow things down so nothing will get done”, then he fails again.

When the President decides that he wants to be the leader of the whole country, he can clear this up and, once again, the answer could be days away.

Update:
I think the President completed his quals to replace Billy Mays after he completes his Presidency. He had a tax cut or new law or spending objective or debt forgiveness program aimed at everyone in the country, and if we get a jobs bill from the Senate today we’ll throw in a free cap snaffler, but wait there’s more!!!!!!!!  

In an odd place in an awkward speech, he threw in enhanced enforcement of pay discrimination toward the end because, without it, he didn’t have enough promises targeted to women specifically.   Earlier he was channeling Howard Dean for a minute as he pointed and listed “I have a (pick your tax cut) for you”.  Those tax cuts, of course, being old tired policy of the last ten years until he revives them with new meaning.  The only thing he didn’t have was the sense to quit being less than honest about all the deficits and, particularly, the debt he blamed 100% on the last administration.  Not only was it irrelevant, at this point, to what solutions he has for it, it borders on (maybe crosses into)  a lie. 

All that adds up to one more chance lost to move forward on the promise of doing things differently in Washington.  He just showed he was getting better at the Washington shuffle. 

Massive Fail by my standards.