Memo to Obama: Just Win, Baby!

Last year at this time, we were imbibing on a fine spring wine, Nouveau Obama, thinking of all the wonderful things the president was going to accomplish in his first hundred days. A long year later, the hangover not yet dissipated, we are unhappy to read about the lingering health care reform bill; to read Gretchen Morgenson’s column in the Times about how credit default swaps continue to threaten the dry timbers of our economic superstructures; to read in Paul Krugman’s column in the Times about the idiotic notion that a Consumer Protection board can be safely tucked into the manifestly, justly, pro-bank Treasury Department. We read about the president’s continued dream of solving America’s problems with a wave of the wand of bipartisanship. We are haunted by the questions Candidate Hillary Clinton raised about the man’s readiness to lead.

Sometime, somewhere, some friend of the president needs to give him a swift kick in the ass. Somebody ought to explain to him that the country is hopping mad, and it’s mad not because `government is too big’ but because people don’t have jobs and the government isn’t doing anything about it and—here’s the kicker—highly bonused investment bankers whose skins were saved by the public continue to wager and collect without impunity. It would do the president a world of good if instead of inviting Republicans to come over for milk and cookies, he began directing throwing his weight around—ordering this, directing that, opening an investigation on something else. He must stop yielding his authority to compose the national narrative to tea baggers and Fox Newsmen.

The president needs to return to whoever sold him the idea of bipartisan support for programs and get his money back. It’s a pretty idea but nonsensical. The president would do well to recall what the great teacher of politics Machiavelli famously wondered, whether it be better to be loved than feared? “It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved . . . [because] men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.’’ In other words, forget bipartisanship, and bring me the head of Mitch McConnell.

If Machiavelli doesn’t do it for the president, let him dial up the great teacher of life and politics, Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders. “Just win, baby,’’ was Davis’s mantra, and it’s one both he and the president should endeavor to remember. Obama’s predecessor launched a war without enough regard for the essential truth of Davis’s point, and by the time he got around the winning the war, he had lost his country, his raison de’etre, and his place in history. Obama needs wins. He has spent a year without one, and the country will stop following him if he fails to achieve success.