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I know people are excited over Obama having won. Hell, I'm glad he won. I even went and voted for him.
Now, let's look at what we can really expect once he takes office. Looking at how he ran his campaign, he's very good at organizing and delegating to very smart people to Get Shit Done. This will serve him well when it comes to the daily grind of running the Executive Branch. He's also very good at motivating people to work towards helping him enact his vision, which complements the organizational skills and will be useful in the same way. He appears to be highly pragmatic: knowing when to give in and not make perfect the enemy of good enough. He's going to need that. A lot.
Congress is its own beast, with 600+ heads, each with their own goals, vision, and electorates to answer to. The Hydra wouldn't stand a chance. This is where it all sort of falls down. He's been a Senator for a few years now, but he hasn't actually spent much time in the Senate. He might sort of be aware of how legislation gets drafted and moved around various committees at an intellectual level, but he's not had the down and dirty day to day trench fight experience dealing with lobbyists, back room staffer relay, and committee politicking personally that it takes just to get a bill on a committee schedule, much less on the floor for a vote. He's got Biden by his side, who has been doing that for years, and he seems to be smart enough to know that he needs that experience and to listen to it. And he better, or Congress will make him their bitch. Most of them have been around a long time, and despite the last eight years, they know and trust each other far more than they do the guy in the White House regardless of party affiliation. These guys have been cranking out sausage for decades, and some newbie twerp, no matter how much he might be revered by the public, better play by their rules or they'll just watch him flounder and laugh from the other end of the Mall.
I expect he'll be a very good administrator who will restore faith in, and respect for, the office he's currently queued up for once he's there, but I expect his policy goals are going to be harder and take longer than he expects and will be watered down to some degree in the process of making them happen at the Congressional level.
Now, let's look at what we can really expect once he takes office. Looking at how he ran his campaign, he's very good at organizing and delegating to very smart people to Get Shit Done. This will serve him well when it comes to the daily grind of running the Executive Branch. He's also very good at motivating people to work towards helping him enact his vision, which complements the organizational skills and will be useful in the same way. He appears to be highly pragmatic: knowing when to give in and not make perfect the enemy of good enough. He's going to need that. A lot.
Congress is its own beast, with 600+ heads, each with their own goals, vision, and electorates to answer to. The Hydra wouldn't stand a chance. This is where it all sort of falls down. He's been a Senator for a few years now, but he hasn't actually spent much time in the Senate. He might sort of be aware of how legislation gets drafted and moved around various committees at an intellectual level, but he's not had the down and dirty day to day trench fight experience dealing with lobbyists, back room staffer relay, and committee politicking personally that it takes just to get a bill on a committee schedule, much less on the floor for a vote. He's got Biden by his side, who has been doing that for years, and he seems to be smart enough to know that he needs that experience and to listen to it. And he better, or Congress will make him their bitch. Most of them have been around a long time, and despite the last eight years, they know and trust each other far more than they do the guy in the White House regardless of party affiliation. These guys have been cranking out sausage for decades, and some newbie twerp, no matter how much he might be revered by the public, better play by their rules or they'll just watch him flounder and laugh from the other end of the Mall.
I expect he'll be a very good administrator who will restore faith in, and respect for, the office he's currently queued up for once he's there, but I expect his policy goals are going to be harder and take longer than he expects and will be watered down to some degree in the process of making them happen at the Congressional level.
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Something I think people fail to realize-- on a gut level, at least-- is that the nature of the Executive and Legislative checks and balances tie the effectiveness of a sitting President pretty firmly to his popularity. In most situations, the President needs some level of support from Congress in order to get shit done. But two thirds of Congress is up for election every two years (all the Representatives and a third of the Senators.)
If the President is unpopular, pretty much for any reason, fair or unfair (stock market tanked, fucked up a hurricane response, popular war went unpopular, scandal hit the media and stuck, whatever) then those two thirds of the Congress that are up for re-election in the next cycle-- and maybe some of the rest-- start looking after their own interests and wondering if they should really cooperate, no matter what they may privately think about the matter. This is exactly what happened to Bush, to a far greater degree than to any other President I remember; you'd probably have to go back to Nixon to find someone that unpopular. And it showed-- at least half the Demorat ads I saw were trashing Republicans just by saying, "...And he supported Bush." Bush was fucking radioactive after Katrina, and never recovered.
(Now, that does go the other way-- if you have a rock star in office, it's at least theoretically possible to bludgeon the opposition for not cooperating, but we have not had a President that popular in my lifetime.)
That's just a structural thing built into the political landscape, into the machinery of actual governance.
The structural thing built into the campaign, which is like a seed crystal for all of the above, is that candidates invariably run to their base for the primary, then to the center for the general election, and offer a different set of promises to each. Obama was no different. Someone is going to be disappointed, here, and we're all holding our breath to find out. It takes about six months for that to start setting in, modulated by the personal charm and political talents of the office holder.
And generally, by six to twelve months in, the world has made it quite clear that, no, it isn't going to sit still and let the President act on it-- it's basically going to rise up and fuck with him in ways that necessitate breaking promises made on the campaign trail even more.
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