Obama and the Policy Approach

nationalaffairs.com ^ | 9/28/09 | WILLIAM SCHAMBRA

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Nine months into his tenure, the patterns of President Barack Obama's style of governing are becoming clear. Obama had no executive experience when he took the presidential oath last ­winter — but he did come in with a particular idea of what politics and government are for, and how they ought to work. It is a view grounded in Progressive politics, and shared by a number of Democratic chief executives in recent decades. But Obama has articulated it, and his administration has embodied it, more fully than most.

Perhaps the most distinctive political characteristic of the Obama administration thus far is the sheer ambition of its early legislative agenda, which seeks to move a host of enormous initiatives all at once. The administration's most prominent organizational feature, meanwhile, is its reliance on issue "czars" to manage broad areas of policy. By the end of his first summer in office, Obama had named some 35 such policy superintendents — "more czars than the Romanovs," as one blogger quipped — overseeing matters ranging from health-care reform, energy, and regulation to stimulus accountability, corporate executive compensation, cyber security, and the Great Lakes.

[Nachum]

Our constitutional system is constructed on this understanding of the limits of reason and of the goals of politics. Every effort to impose the policy approach upon it has so far ended in failure and disappointment, and done much lasting harm.

[Jet Jaguar]

BTTT

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In other words, to paraphrase Tip O’Neill, all politics is local.