{"id":9452,"date":"2011-04-28T16:20:01","date_gmt":"2011-04-28T20:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=9452"},"modified":"2011-04-28T17:03:25","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T21:03:25","slug":"the-anatomy-of-obamas-leadership-failures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/9452\/the-anatomy-of-obamas-leadership-failures\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anatomy of Obama&#8217;s Leadership Failures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The American Interest&#8217;s Walter Russell Mead is one of the nation&#8217;s most consistently insightful pundits. He&#8217;s also an Obama voter and a Democrat, albeit one of unusual intellectual independence. That&#8217;s just one of the reasons that it must be so bracing for denizens of the White House to read\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.the-american-interest.com\/wrm\/2011\/04\/27\/falling-between-two-stools\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mead&#8217;s most recent entry<\/a> at his\u00a0Via Meadia blog at AI. In an essay rife with criticism&#8217;s of President Obama&#8217;s leadership style, Mead distills it all down to one scathing two-paragraph passage:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: left\">Here is the paradox we face:\u00a0 The President is a consensus-seeker whose decision making style rewards polarization and a conciliator who loses friends without winning over enemies.<\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: left\">The President\u2019s problem is not, I think, that he seeks compromise.\u00a0 It is that the type of compromise he chooses is so ineffective.\u00a0 Splitting the difference is not leadership; leadership is looking at the positions of two sides and finding creative new directions that give something to all sides \u2014 but move the ball down the field.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: left\">Forget the liberal base or the intellectually capricious swing voter. If Obama can&#8217;t secure the allegiance of a left-leaning mind as sharp as Mead&#8217;s, he has serious problems going into 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The American Interest&#8217;s Walter Russell Mead is one of the nation&#8217;s most consistently insightful pundits. He&#8217;s also an Obama voter and a Democrat, albeit one of unusual intellectual independence. That&#8217;s just one of the reasons that it must be so bracing for denizens of the White House to read\u00a0Mead&#8217;s most recent entry at his\u00a0Via Meadia [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[914,143,2633,2164],"class_list":["post-9452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-2012-presidential-election","tag-barack-obama","tag-presidential-leadership","tag-walter-russell-mead"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9452"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9461,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9452\/revisions\/9461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}