Obama has wasted too much capital on healthcare ( wayy too much if it fails anyway).
This administration should be setting the agenda not allowing debate within the country to take control of it. Say what you want to about the evil bush adminstation, you can't deny they knew how to get the message across and stir the country in their direction. They'd been better off attacking the jobs/unemployment issue.
To the contrary: the Bush administration proved adept at gaming language so that it sounded like something far different from what it was. The first indication that I got of this was his "Healthy Forests Initiative", a promotion of the quick-buck practice of loggers known as "clear-cutting". Loggers remove every tree for its lumber, and all that is left is a bare slope easily eroded. But profits come swiftly, and erosion leaves huge costs and may make a denuded moonscape with little capacity to ever grow trees again. "Healthy forest"? No forest is left, but there certainly are no unhealthy trees allowed to remain. Such was in 2001 soon after the Bush inauguration.
That was only the first. "No Child Left Behind" sounds like an effort to ensure that no child, whatever economic and cultural reality he grows up in, would avoid a rigorous and effective education and would thus get a chance in life. Much of NCLB relied upon standardized testing that would test academic results, and schools would be penalized for substandard performance. In theory that is wonderful as a means of forcing incompetent teachers into different lines of work and require those remaining to improve their methods... but as it turns out, individual upbringing and fiscal realities of underfunded schools in impoverished areas would ensure that the usual knowledge that underprivileged kids would get shoved even further into failure as resources for their schools would be gutted while the kids with more advantages would get more resources directed toward them.
I can only think of the lyrics of a 19th-century folksong, The Dodger, and it has nothing to do with a baseball team formerly in Brooklyn:
No, im referring to after 9/11. The Bush administration was able to get people behind them for a war that had nothing to do with 9/11. But because they were so good at setting the agenda they made it happen. Of course once people found out it was all over for them, but hey it worked.
Obamas administration don't know how to do this.
