If there is one thing that the United States Government desperately needs now, it is leadership. The courage to formulate policies, articulate them, and present them persuasively to the electorate at large. If nothing else, that is the greatest power and potential that the President of the United States possesses.
By these standards, Barack Obama has failed inexorably. He has spent more time walking in lock-step with process politics, articulating nothing reasonable, coherent, or consistent, despite making a repeated, tone-deaf case to the American people for Obamacare, which shifted steadily away from the grander progressive vision of a single-payer system to be transformed into European socialized medicine.
Obama has spent more time collecting, aggrandizing, and witnessing power slip through his effete fingers as the American people push a necessary center-right correction on his far-left agenda.
And still the nation craves leadership.
A junior senator from a liberal Mid-western state with two years of service at the federal preceded by limited engagement in a state legislature, community organizing, and some dazzling speeches at the 2004 Democratic National Convention: not a sufficient resume for a President.
Yet the people elected Obama, the Anti-Bush, Anti-Republican in a year when both were so deeply unpopular, that even left-wing pacifist George McGovern could have been elected.
From January 20, 2009 to today, this country has suffered under a child who wanted to play grown-up. This country needs a leader, someone with executive experience, or a tried and tested composure to move and shake in Beltway politics without sacrificing principle or personality.
A chief executive with previous executive experience–that is a sine qua non for the next President, Democrat or Republican.