By Ben Domenech - October 24, 2012

Two weeks from now, if President Obama is no longer the president, it will be because of a number of factors outside his control: the downturn in Europe, the fallout from housing and education policy decisions of prior presidents, a fearful consumer base which restrained their pocketbooks for too long, and more. But there is one decision in particular where Obama had near total control, and took the wrong path. Clive Crook identifies it today, even if I take issue with some of his diagnosis: Obama ceded the center.

“If Obama should lose this election, many will say it was because the economy was weak and because the president is black. Actually, it will be because he fought it as a failed progressive rather than a successful centrist… Every voter who chose Obama in 2008 still wants him to succeed. But not all are convinced he can, and that’s partly because he has stopped trying to be the president he said he’d be. The need to fix Washington, the need for a bridge-building, post-partisan presidency was uppermost in centrist voters’ minds when they elected Obama, and he’d made that the core of his campaign. Washington is still broken – more so than before – and Obama is no longer even trying to mend it… The president’s error wasn’t that he refused to compromise. It was that he compromised so reluctantly, denying himself ownership of his own policies and making every accomplishment seem like a defeat.”

There are a number of reasons this is true, but in surveying the past four years, it’s incredible how much Obama has ceded the big policy decisions to others within his own party, failing to take command of the situations he was presented with. The contrast with Bill Clinton is not just a stylistic or ideological one – it’s a basic approach to dealing with intransigence in ways which allow you to claim victory with a smile instead of grinding your teeth as you defend a policy result no one particularly likes. We should’ve seen this from the get-go considering how Obama conceded leadership on not one but two major policy fights – the unsuccessful push for cap and trade, passed by the House but left to rot in the 60 vote majority Senate, and the ironically named Obamacare, which bears little in common with the health care plans he outlined for the American people in 2008.

Smart liberals will disagree with this frame, but I still believe that in allowing the leftward elements of his party to take the lead in defining these policies in the early days of his administration, Obama poisoned the well for any ability to work across the aisle… and he never sought to mend fences in the wake of the 2010 elections. Obama had multiple opportunities to do so: John Boehner is a workmanlike Midwestern pragmatist, with none of Newt Gingrich’s yearning for the ideological fray.

The campaign Obama is waging today could be trumpeting the products of a successful pivot back to pro-business tax cutting competence, reclaiming the national agenda following the rise of the tea party movement. But he never did, and even today, the second term agenda he’s laid out seems more like a repeated insistence that his original course was the right one, consarnit.

Gone are the days of hope and change – now it’s just one long bout of concern trolling. It’s as if the bitterness of the 2010 rebuff has stayed with Obama ever since, gnawing at him, preventing any reflection on his choices. Maybe it’s because it’s the first time anyone’s told him “No.”