Calling It Like It Is

Clearly Obama's election was a transformational moment in this country's history. Now Barack is busy working to make his time in office a transformative presidency.

From a historical perspective the first step to becoming a "reconstructive leader" is to repudiate your predecessor and Obama has gotten a good start on that front.

From The Atlantic...

From his inauguration address forward, President Obama hasn't pulled any punches in criticizing the record of his predecessor, George W. Bush. In that process--which reached a new peak with the release of the administration's budget plan last Thursday--Obama is aggressively employing a strategy used by the presidents who have most powerfully realigned the political landscape through American history. It is an approach that Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek has shrewdly termed "the authority to repudiate."

Skowronek noted that the presidents who most successfully constructed lasting electoral majorities all followed presidents widely viewed as failures. These repeated couplings between "manifest incapacity and towering success" have included John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800; John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1828; James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln in 1860; Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932; and, most recently, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The White House took its indictment to a new level in the budget blueprint it released last Thursday. In a relentless 11 pages, the first chapter offers a withering point-by-point critique of Bush's economic record and governing performance, from anemic job creation and income growth (the median income among working-age families fell by nearly $2,000 from 2000 through 2007) to rising poverty (up by 5.7 million from 2000 through 2007). It denounces Bush as overly secretive ("It is no coincidence that the policy failures of the past eight years have been accompanied by unprecedented Governmental secrecy"), incompetent, fiscally irresponsible, short-sighted, ideologically rigid (pursuing "a dogmatic deregulatory approach") and favoring the rich over all others. The White House sums up the previous occupant's record this way: "This is the legacy that we inherit--a legacy of mismanagement and misplaced priorities, of missed opportunities and of deep, structural problems ignored for too long."

Ouch.

The truth hurts George. Deal with it.