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Good point by John Judis:
Obama's commitment to radical centrism could also be severely tested. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed the support of popular movements, gave priority to getting their substantive legislative agendas adopted; and they succeeded by uniting their supporters and dividing their opponents. If they had focused first on uniting Democrats and Republicans behind common objectives, they probably would not have gotten their way. And, if they had initially turned their attention, as Obama has proposed, to "the most sweeping ethics reform in history," it is unlikely they would have passed public works spending (Roosevelt) or tax cuts (Reagan). Jimmy Carter, too, provides a cautionary tale: The last Democrat to take office on a radical centrist agenda, Carter failed to tame Congress or K Street and was defeated for reelection. He had campaigned for the presidency on the presumption that reformers could overturn the status quo in Washington. In the end, he turned out to be wrong.On one level, this is just the basic question of what Obama, or any politician, will do first. If they apply their mandate to ethics reform, it will be more likely to pass. If they fight for carbon auctions, they'll be more likely to pass. And then, all else being equal (and it never is, of course), whichever controversial priority comes second will be slightly less likely to pass, and what comes third will be even less likely than what came second, and so forth. Things tend to get harder, not easier, as presidential terms drag on.But with Obama, there's a particular tension in his rhetoric. You can believe, as Mark Schmitt has eloquently argued, that his emphasis on unity is part of a larger theory dedicated to achieving legislative change. Or you can believe that Obama thinks polarization is an actual problem to be solved and he means to conduct his presidency in such a way as to render our politics less divided. As Judis notes, that will probably require a consensus-based vision of governance that imposes serious constraints on which priorities Obama can pursue and how aggressively he can fight for them. Or it's possible that unity can be both a means and an end -- that Obama can prove so popular that the GOP is scared to oppose his initiatives -- but I think that's rather unlikely. And I'm not even sure Obama himself knows, or even can know. It'll only be when he has to actually make the trade-offs between who he wants to be, what he wants to achieve, and what he's willing to sacrifice that he'll really have to figure this out.
