>The Economist is a pretty conservative magazine, but their cover this week hits the mark. “One question, Mr. President,” it reads, “just what would you do with another four years?” with the passage of the stimulus (shoulda gone farther), health care reform (shoulda gone farther), Dodd-Frank (shoulda gone really farther), getting out of Iraq (we should be out of Afghanistan, too), killing bin Laden and the leadership of al Qaeda, and tactfully supporting regime change in the middle east without putting American troops at risk, I think the president has done a fine job and deserves reelection. But as one who is appalled with the fact that the Republicans have been allowed to play the stagnation game and get away with it–I don’t think the majority has been thwarted in such a nakedly cynical way since the slave states seceded–I want to see more. When the president takes the stage Thursday night, he arrives as a slightly diminished figure, as someone whose many successes seem to matter less than the times when his enemies have kept him at bay. The president needs to overcome that; he needs to assert himself as the central figure of government, and the only way he can do that is by laying his plans before the American people, by making it clear what he wants to do and where he wants to take us. I know he can win a narrow chess match campaign this fall, snatching swing states into his electoral college column by appealing to an interest group here and an interest group there. That could give his a landslide in the electoral college, but if the popular vote is just 50-50, Obama will have achieved merely a paper victory, and I just don’t think that will be good enough. He needs to win a mandate to govern that he can use to overcome Republican roadblocks. Please, Mr. President, take the fight to the GOP. Hit the beach; take the hill; seize the high ground. You need to win more than an election; you need to win the authority to rule.
