Obama should have blamed Bush

With a year in office completed there have been plenty of interesting articles on Obama.

Recently I've been worried about his position and I'm starting to feel like we have another President Carter. There's too much reliance on focus groups (Captured in this very good article in NYMag http://bit.ly/7czktI). There's too much desire to be loved by the nation. There's little in the way of leadership decision making. I want Obama to be the best President America has had but I'm not feeling it right now.

I have picked some articles here that I think do a good job of covering this topic but I want to focus on one that I thought was brilliant and insightful about positioning.

It's an article from the UK Times and talks about how Obama focused his blame on the Banks and not on the Republicans thereby allowing the Republicans to shake themselves off and start to come back as a solid challenger to Obama. Check out the article if for no other reason than to learn how important positioning is in any endeavor. http://bit.ly/8FIBwR

The Economist's article The Man Who fell to Earth http://bit.ly/8fQmMY does a good job of highlighting the tension between knowing what needs fixing but not knowing how to fix it. "Diagnosing what is going wrong is easier than figuring out how to fix it, because voters’ concerns are contradictory." The point that resonates for me in this article is this point about voters being contradictory. If you rely on their direction through focus groups, it makes sense based on this observation that you will get nowhere. You have to lead.

This week's NYMag article talks about the importance of his State of the Union speech this evening in how he pitches the speech. It can no longer be just about eloquence, passion and conviction. There has to be a dose of reality in his speech "They will be studying him to see if he grasps the magnitude of his and his party's peril, and trying to discern what he intends to do about it." http://bit.ly/4wdJy3

Finally, the February issue of Monocle magazine sheds a positive light on his last year saying that "Barack Obama may not yet have brought about as much change as promised, but he himself has certainly changed. He has learnt that he will have to fight dirty to get things done – and this means his first year in office can be deemed a success."

Let's hope so and let's hope he starts to show leadership in action not just leadership in words.