Anyone who watched the televised exchange between the President and Republican lawmakers at their retreat last week – anyone, that is, with an ounce of objectivity in them – would presumably concede that, in a straight-up fight between Barack Obama and the entire Republican leadership, the President would win by a clear knock out. So if that was all you saw last week, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Democrats were on course for more victories in November and to the easy passage of health care and immigration reform.

But you would be wrong.

Obama won the small-staged exchange, but on the big one – in the State of the Union Address that held the attention of vast swathes of middle America last Wednesday evening  – he scored a remarkably large number of unnecessary own goals. In politics you win votes by backdoor dealings on legislative detail, but you win hearts and minds by the way you lay the ground for those votes. How you frame the issue, as well as what the issue is, determines the outcome. Framing key issues in the Republican way makes for the appearance of a welcome bipartisanship, but it also does the Republicans’ work for them, robbing bipartisanship of the outcomes that progressives want.

There were three own goals at least on Wednesday night. READ FULL POST

It took FDR two goes to establish the political architecture of the New Deal. We do well to remember that the Roosevelt administration triggered a second “hundred days” of radical reform as a conservative Supreme Court began to strike down the first wave of New Deal legislation. There is surely a lesson here for the Obama presidency. After a week in which the voters of Massachusetts removed the possibility of a super majority in the Senate and the Supreme Court gave corporations unlimited freedom to spend on political campaigns, this is surely the moment to follow the Roosevelt example. After a year of frustrated bipartisanship, it is surely the time, if not for a second coming, then at least for a complete retooling of the Obama program.

Indeed that retooling seems to be underway, and has started well. The Glass-Steagall type tightening of regulations on the financial system proposed by the President on Thursday took policy in exactly the right direction, and was delivered in exactly the right tone. Volker trumped Geitner, and not a moment too soon. The need now is for that momentum to spread, and spread quickly, across the domestic policy agenda as a whole. We need more trumping of the less radical by the more. We need the Biden/Bernstein voice louder and more influential, the Summer one quieter and further from the podium. We need a coherent progressive policy message in the State of the Union Address on which Obama can then campaign, and around which progressive enthusiasm can again rally. READ FULL POST