moral and spiritual terms, by inspiring people with your positive
vision and your powerful rhetoric, and by bringing people to their feet
ready in their millions to work to help accomplish your goals.
You've done rather little of any of these since Inauguration Day.
As a result, you've allowed a potential Colossus of presidential power
to be diminished. And this has now gone so far that it is the
other side that is on the offensive, while you are struggling on
defense.
This diminution of your presidential power has happened because you
ceased to work with the great moral and spiritual energy that you
unleashed as a candidate. It was this moral and spiritual force
that was able to accomplish the seemingly impossible: it put into
the presidency a black man with a scant four years experience in
national government.
Where as a candidate you spoke in moral and spiritual terms, as president you speak to us more as a policy wonk.
Where as a candidate you conveyed a vision of where you wanted to lead
us, as president you've handed Congress some general ideas and left it
to them to flesh them out or, more likely, undermine them.
Where as a candidate you inspired people with your rhetoric, as president you've spoken in the earth-bound tones of a professor.
Where as a candidate you brought people to their feet ready to march
with you, as president you've not mobilized your base and lately have
even begun to lose their support.
The costs of this abandonment of the force that brought you to the
White House have become all-too-evident in the course the
health-care-reform struggle has taken. You went into the ring
with your strategic approach, your enemies entered with their
despicable fear-mongering lies, and the resultant clash did not go all
that well for you.
You should have kicked ass in that fight (see "First Piece: Why It's
Clear, Mr. President, You've Made an Important Strategic Error"
). But you didn't dominate this struggle because you abandoned
that moral and spiritual force --and the tools by which you'd summoned
it up-- that brought you to power.
Your presentation of the need for health-care reform has been prosaic
and earth-bound, and the American people have not been inspired by it.
Your not putting forward your own clear vision of where you want us to
go, and leaving it to Congress to define the program, has left the
issue in a muddle.
Your not speaking to the American people in a way that will bring them
to their feet and inspire them has given America the impression that
all the passion in this debate is on the other side, among the people
inflamed by the lies spread by your enemies.
It's time to pick up those tools of vision and spirit and inspiration and clarity again. This battle can still be won.
And you can again become the leader so many imagined you to be on that
glorious evening last November when your words went out from Grant Park
in Chicago bringing inspiration to so many millions throughout America
and, indeed, across the earth.
Be that leader and you can beat these lying, perfidious people who are
trying to give you your Waterloo. And you can lead America into
being that better nation that you had us envision last year. "Yes
you can!"
**
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