What a second-term Obama can — and can’t — accomplish

Obama did not need to defend liberalism during this campaign. His second term -- and legacy -- will depend on it

BY ALAN WOLFE

No matter which candidate wins on Election Day, both liberalism and conservatism will have lost. This was supposed to be a moment of choice: Voters would be presented with two contrasting visions of the future and would give one or the other a mandate to move forward. But somewhere along the way clarity, as it so often does during presidential campaigns, gave way to horse race strategies, and we are left with a mess.

The Republicans, symbolized by Romney’s decision during the debates to offer an echo, bear a major share of the blame for the muddle. We nonetheless have a fairly good sense that if Romney were to win, and if he were to bring the Senate along with him, he would etch a new sketch and make a sharp turn to the right. If Obama, by contrast, hammers out an Electoral College victory, we have little idea what he will do. Because the Republicans opted not to display their conservatism during the election, Obama was under no obligation to defend his liberalism.

This may, for all I know, be exactly what Obama wants: a second term that frees him to secure the bipartisan agreement on the budget that is the one thing that evidently excites him. But if he were to opt for that course, we can be all but certain that, learning no lessons from defeat, the Republicans once again will spurn his invitation. It will take more than one presidential election before the Republicans will ever prefer governance to politics. When a country has only two parties, and one of them is so out of touch with reality, stalemate can only continue.

Given how unlikely it is that Republicans in Congress would ever work with him, a second term presents Obama with an opportunity to explain as well as cajole. For reasons no one has made understandable, the president, during his first term, made no real effort to sell Obamacare, a piece of legislation likely to go down in history as liberalism’s greatest accomplishment since the Great Society. Fortunately, John Roberts stepped in and saved the law, no doubt to the administration’s enormous relief. (Imagine what shape the 2012 campaign would have taken if Roberts voted the other way.) It is as if Obama believed that Americans, who have been hearing for decades that government does everything wrong, would change their minds and decide it can do right just because it actually had began to do so. Politics, alas, does not work that way.

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http://www.salon.com/2012/11/04/what_a_second_term_obama_can_and_cant_accomplish/