nstead we have been seeing attempts at arbitration between forces he feels impotent to influence.

While it’s hard for me to agree that progressive’s want to get out of Afghanistan immediately- I don’t think they all agree- I would say that many are of the view that sending more troops and even more contractors ( mercenaries) to in effect “nation build” is not the way to go. What is not moral is the killing of innocents and subjecting our soldiers to the horrors of war while instilling the belief in them that this is necessary for our security. That is by no means unquestionable. As well there is the question of being at war without the country feeling it or wanting it or sacrificing for it. I think many progressives would like to see a draft.

Regarding Obama not using his bully pulpit- that is different from bullying. Using the prestige and power of the President to push for goals that Obama lead us to believe he believes in, is the minimum. What we have been seeing is capitulation. His opponents in the Congress and equals abroad smell weakness and take advantage of it. Look at what happened in Copenhagen. Look at what happened with the Israeli’s and Palestinian’s. Look at what happened with healthcare reform.If Obama is looking to change things in the long term don’t you think we should be seeing some direction/leadership? Instead we have been seeing attempts at arbitration between forces he feels impotent to influence?

Of course he’s just one year in and he could evolve. I think this criticism by Drew Western is very strong but not far off, if off at all.

Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator

You write:

“Obama has the intelligence certainly, and a capable heart… but I don’t feel they are working together towards the same goal.”

Personally, I’m confident that while his head and heart wrestle in front of us, the endgame is the same. I see our President as a follower of Dewey and James. In the book “The Metaphysical Club,” Menand writes that Dewey’s pragmatism was based on the hypothesis that “thinking and acting are just two names for a single process – the process of making our way best we can in a universe shot through with contingency.”

For instance, the progressives criticize Obama for his attempt to be pragmatic in Afghanistan…getting out immediately, they say, is “morally the right thing to do.”

Dewey’s would be/could be answer to the Obama critics lies in “pragmatism’s most basic claim, which is that what people choose to believe is just what they think it is good to believe.”

For many progressives, it simply sounds like something “good to believe”…that we should be out of Afghanistan right now, so they ask Obama to fall in line.

Potter, you lament that Obama is not using “his bully pulpit,” but wasn’t the man’s whole campaign in response to bullying? Obama did not run for office to change some laws in the short term…he ran to change America in the long. Sure he could muscle in some of these laws by tapping into partisanship, but those tactics would divide us more, and thereby embolden the far right, thus compromising his principle (“what he says he believes in”) of a united nation. Those tactics would be an impractical strategy for sustained change.

http://tinyurl.com/yc6rjur

Obama has the intelligence certainly, and a capable heart… but I don’t feel they are working together towards the same goal. Again tonight in the Lehrer interview on PBS- in a question posed about how bills are being held up by the need for a super majority upon threat of filibuster- Obama removed himself from using his bully pulpit to pressure Congress to end this gridlock. This is a major problem now… that and campaign finance/money interests. Obama kept saying this was a bad situation and that if it continues something will have to be done…… he said that after he spent a long time deflecting a straightforward response to Lehrer bringing up ( in a timid way) the (now general) criticism that Obama does not seem to want to fight for what he says he believes in.

“I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.”

If she indeed said it, I’m sure it was inspired by her husband’s rival/friend, Thomas Jefferson.

Maybe the best critique of Jefferson’s contradictory nature came from Thomas Jefferson himself, in his “Head vs. Heart” love letter to Maria Cosway.

http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/documents/frame_ih198172.htm

At one point his heart tells his head:

“When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science; to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours; nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their controul. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science.”

Could it be that in the cohabitation of our new country, Hamilton was the head and Jefferson the heart? And could it be that Jefferson’s rationalization for keeping slaves came from his head, and writing the words, “all men are created equal,” came from his heart?

And could it be that 2009 will go down as the year the world waited out a Battle Royale between the Head and Heart in the “divided empire” of Barack Obama’s mind?

I am still having a hard time swallowing that Nobel speech. It seemed too much like he was trying to convince the world of what he can’t convince himself. I guess I am officially disappointed in Obama after holding off saying so and defending him for months.

We know Obama is not a peacenik nor did he claim to be. But in this instance I think he uses “there is evil in the world” as an excuse to avoid standing firm for what he believes in, if he does, which he should, that we don’t go to war unless there is no other way and it’s absolutely vital to do so. That there is evil in the world does not mean that we have to be evil to fight it- Nor does it mean it can or even needs to be fought. He said during the campaign that he was not against war, but he was against dumb wars. He never told us why he has sent so many to fight what to many Americans still seem a dumb war now. If it is to appease the generals and avoid Republican criticism and then to make moves to get out before the next Presidential election- then that also can be called evil.

A realist ( a Hamiltonian) would know what the Jeffersonian knows, the futility of war…. a nasty human habit.