Thursday, April 7, 2011

President Obama's Role in Budget Negotiations: Undercutting His Role in Presiding

On April 5, 2011, President Obama observed, “We’re going to have some very tough negotiations. And there are going to be, I think, very sharply contrasting visions in terms of where we should move the country. That’s a legitimate debate to have.” (1) He sounded very presidential in making the statement because he was taking the perspective of the nation as a whole. Furthermore, he used that vantage-point to try to keep negotiations from falling off the track. “If they can’t sort it out,” he said, “then I want them back here tomorrow.” (2) In short, he was presiding, rather than being partisan in taking a side, as he framed the situation facing the union. 

                                             Doug Mills, The New York Times                 

However, even as the president was referring to the two sides sorting the budget out as “they,” he himself was on one of the sides. That is, even though he “sought to position himself above the nitty-gritty haggling going on in Congress, which . . . limited his influence on the process” yet distanced him from any blame, his taking a side in the dispute subtly worked against his attempt to preside to hold the process as a whole together. (3) 

The full essay is at The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.


1.   Gregory Korte, “Meeting Fails to End Impasse on Federal Budget,” USA Today, April 6, 2011, 2A.
2.  Naftali Bendavid, Jonathan Weisman, and Carol E. Lee, "Budget Talks Head to Brink,” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2011, pp. A6.
3. Ibid.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Political Ideology in a U.S. Federal Healthcare Budget: Disentangling Redistribution, Government and Federalism

A shift in power from the U.S. Governments to those of the states is distinct from a redution in the size of government. These are distinct, albeit not disparate, unrelated, goals. Shifting power does not in itself imply or mandate a reduction in the size of government. For example, in shifting public health-care policy, an expansion of government could result if enough states develop programs further-reaching than what Congress had enacted.  Of course, as per the nature of federalism, particularly in an empire-scale instance, the resulting health-care programs would differ from republic to republic, given the innate heterogeneity that exists at such a scale.