What should obama do

His reluctance to engage members of Congress cut across the aisle, with many Democrats just as furious as Republicans. This would only occasionally break out into the press, but it was well known on the Hill. So while it is true that Obama faced an extremely oppositional Republican Party, historians must not ignore the fact that Obama was a distant politician. In the end, he was more concerned with policy and reluctant to engage in the political battles that make for successful and sustainable policy.

Kamarck Given the sense of emergency at the time and the Democratic control of both houses of Congress, Obama could have used his rather large amount of political capital to authorize and then fight for a larger stimulus package, one which focused intensely on job creation and retention. But the star economist on his team, Lawrence Summers, disagreed with Romer and argued that the economy could be stabilized using a much smaller stimulus. Second, instead of focusing relentlessly on jobs, as Romer, most of Congress, and most of the nation wanted, the administration quickly pivoted to its next policy agenda item: health care.

They easily took control of the House, picking up sixty-three seats—the biggest midterm election gains for the out party since And from then on, the Obama presidency struggled under a radicalized Republican Party.

And so for its remaining six years, the Obama presidency had to confront a Republican Party that was hell-bent on opposing everything he did. But was such opposition set in stone? Notes: Data from Eisenhower through George H. Bush from Gallup. Because some earlier data did not include partisan leaning, Republicans and Democrats in this graphic do not include leaners. Source: Survey conducted Nov. Today, more issues cleave along partisan lines than at any point since surveys began to track public opinion.

Beginning around , however, they began to diverge. And the gap has only grown wider since then: Democrats today are more than twice as likely as Republicans to say that immigrants strengthen the country. Gun control has long been a partisan issue, with Democrats considerably more likely than Republicans to say it is more important to control gun ownership than protect gun rights.

But what was a percentage-point gap between supporters of Obama and John McCain on this question in surged to a historic point gap between Clinton and Trump supporters in Climate change marks another area where the parties are deeply divided. Wide partisan divides stretch from the causes and cures for climate change to trust in climate scientists and their research. This compares with more than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

Americans felt disillusioned with the way Washington responded to the financial meltdown of Against a backdrop of global terrorism — including several attacks on American soil — Americans also became less confident in the ability of their government to handle threats. Americans also had serious concerns about privacy, though the government was not the sole focus of skepticism in this respect.

During the Obama years, Americans were highly skeptical their personal information would remain private and secure, regardless of whether it was the government or the private sector that collected it. In a survey, fewer than one-in-ten Americans said they were very confident that each of 11 separate entities — ranging from credit card companies to email providers — would keep their records private and secure.

In Germany, favorability of the U. In the United Kingdom, confidence in the U. The Obama bump was most dramatic in Western Europe, but was also evident in virtually every country surveyed between and But the U. Russian views of the U. Meanwhile, certain U. Americans, meanwhile, have become less certain of their place in the world. The share of Americans who say it would be better if the U.

Roughly half of Americans say U. About half of Americans say the U. If demographic changes are slow, technological changes can be swift. In the new millennium, major technology revolutions have occurred in broadband connectivity, social media use and mobile adoption. With the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other apps, social media use climbed to about three-quarters of online adults by After President Obama visited Kenya, the U.

We have announced an effort to create a near-total ban on the commercial trade of ivory, implemented the strongest environmental protections in an international trade deal in history, and worked with China to enact a similar commitment to ban ivory. Recognizing the importance of providing healthy, sustainable seafood to Americans, President Obama focused Administration efforts to combat illegal fishing and seafood fraud through a Presidential Task Force that will mobilize domestic and international partnerships to detect and combat illegal fishing and seafood fraud.

In addition to protecting many of our iconic public lands and marine ecosystems , we have put in place stronger safeguards to balance conservation and responsible onshore and offshore energy development. Through new landscape-level planning across the country, like in Moab, Utah , we have pioneered smarter approaches to reduce conflict between protecting natural treasures, enabling responsible energy development, and ensuring access for outdoor recreation.

The President is committed to protecting natural resources central to our American heritage. Under President Obama, we have taken mores steps to act on climate than ever before, reducing our own emissions, investing in clean energy, and working with the international community to secure a historic international climate agreement.

You are here Home Blog. Indeed, social-science data would be so compelling that the solution to the problem would likely emerge from its own scientifically rigorous description. It's not just that facts would be more important than values: Facts would suggest the most plausible values.

Or, as the American pragmatists believed, what works best to help us grasp and shape reality becomes the moral good. We find traces of this thinking in The Audacity of Hope. It also aims to quell the shrill exchange of equal because equally baseless opinions that, in his view, has come to characterize American politics.

Where available — and Obama intends to multiply the situations where they are available — pure non-political facts will provide the grounds for the resolution of policy questions, fulfilling Progressivism's faith in the natural and social sciences. But what then to say about the increasing use of social-science data by conservative scholars, who seem to use it to provoke and sustain, rather than to ameliorate, partisan conflict with Progressive reformers?

Some liberals simply insist that what conservative scholars produce is inferior or false social science, because it is produced in service of ideology rather than objective truth. Eric Wanner, former president of the liberal Russell Sage Foundation, insists that "the AEIs and the Heritages of the world represent the inversion of the Progressive faith that social science should shape social policy.

But the notion that there is true and false social science relies on our ability to locate a fixed and universally accepted standard according to which we can say that some conclusions are beyond dispute because they are empirically true. Certainly that was the initial Progressive vision for social science. Yet the policy and social sciences have come nowhere close to such a standard in assessing society. In , Edward Banfield wrote that the "persistent efforts of reformers to do away with politics and to put social science and other expertise in its place are not to be accounted for by the existence of a body of knowledge about how to solve social problems," because no such body exists.

Indeed, he continued, "there are few social science theories or findings that could be of much help to a policy maker. Ten years later, Ronald Brunner noted in Policy Sciences that it was difficult to assess the usefulness of the policy movement, because its "various parts tend to differ in their judgments of the relevant standards, data, and inferences to be drawn from them, whenever their judgments are made explicit"; nonetheless, the policy approach's "results typically have fallen short of the aspirations for rational, objective analysis.

Rationality would be served because the consequences of policy alternatives could be predicted with precision and accuracy," while the "valid system of generalizations would reduce controversy in the policy arena. In short, policy science cannot be depended upon to dampen or eliminate conflicting points of view because it is itself riven by deep divisions over how best to develop, analyze, implement, and evaluate public policy.

And these divisions cannot be explained away by a conservative conspiracy to dilute genuine, objective social science with a spurious, ideologically driven imitation. Social science begins from one place or another in society, and can do great good that way.

But it cannot step outside the circle of our social life; no human activity can. The Obama administration will of course insist that its policy plans are rooted in unassailably objective research. But there may well be equally compelling research supporting contrary conclusions, and the debate between them cannot be resolved by insisting that true science supports only one kind of conclusion.

Often the origins of the dispute have to do with people's sense of the most important questions to ask, the most critical goals to set, or the highest ends of society. These are generally determined by those outmoded, yet stubborn, values — not social science.

President Obama knows, however, that whatever the state of the policy approach's epistemological foundations, it is vital to making the case for his political project.

For example, he can insist that he is undertaking only reluctantly, and certainly without selfish ambition or ulterior motive, a massive and ambitious expansion of government into major segments of the American economy because it has been shown necessary. The decision was not driven by personal choice, he seemed to suggest.

It was simply what a thoroughgoing and effective policy approach demands. As Ceaser points out, "to speak of a policy for any given area of activity already implies that that area is a matter for legitimate superintendence by government. But the mention of unsophisticated rubes points to a final possible problem for President Obama's policy approach, this one related to America's commitment to democratic self-government.

Obama's technocratic rhetoric is meant to be soothing and reassuring to an American public fed up with intractable ideological division: Many of our problems will resolve themselves once we have collected the facts about them, because facts can ground and shape our political discussions, deflating ideological claims and leaving behind rational and objective answers in place of tired old debates. But in spite of several decades of data production by social science, American politics has proven itself to be remarkably resistant to the pacifying effects of facts.

It has continued to be driven, as James Madison predicted, by the proliferation and clash of diverse "opinions, passions and interests. Indeed, as Madison put it, "as long as the reason of man continues to be fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

But if that is their view, they can hardly claim much empirical evidence for it. Though Madison believed the most common source of different opinions to be property, he also understood that Americans were likely as well to divide along religious and moral lines, reflecting convictions about ultimate questions of good and evil that cannot be resolved through scientific reason.

This does not mean they take in only part of the picture, but that they disagree about what is best for the whole, for reasons that run deep. These disagreements, although they do not always lend themselves to scientific analysis and technical solution, speak to genuine human yearnings and concerns.

They are often rooted in many centuries of experience and wisdom, and can hardly be dismissed as irrelevant to the life of a liberal society — let alone as illegitimate subjects for political debate. This leads to the most troublesome implication of Obama's policy approach, which revealed itself in what might have been the chief blunder of his presidential campaign: his offhand remark that some Americans continue to "cling" to guns and religion in the face of adversity.

The comment betrayed Obama's debt to the Progressive view that such parochial values are poor substitutes for a sophisticated understanding of the larger networks of causality that determine the lives of everyday Americans. In light of such an understanding, the old debates that grip American politics may well look rather ridiculous. The policy approach begins from the assumption that those old disagreements are fundamentally an error, or a function of a temporary lack of information.

It begins, in other words, from the contention that democracy is an illegitimate, or at least a highly inadequate, way to govern a society. This is a deeply anti-political way of thinking, grounded in a gross exaggeration of the capacity of human knowledge and reason.

American politics as we have known it appreciates the fact that fallible men and women cannot command the whole — and so must somehow manage the interactions and the tensions among parts. Social science — however sophisticated it might now be — has come nowhere near disproving that premise.

Unless it does, social science will always best serve politics by helping to address the particular problems that bedevil society as they arise, rather than treating society itself as one large problem to be solved. This is not because society is not in fact an intricate web as the early Progressives asserted, but precisely because it is — a web far too intricate to be reliably manipulated.