The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza has responded to the argument we made in yesterday's column, namely that Barack Obama's repeated musings to the effect that it would be nice to have dictatorial power amount to an acknowledgment, as we put it, "that he is ineffectual: that he lacks the political skill either to strike a compromise or to bend his opponents to his will."
As Lizza sees it, the problem is "the tendency of many Washington pundits .�.�. to invest the Presidency with far more power that [sic] the Constitution gives it." He sums up this putative pundit view as follows: "If only Obama would lead, this fiscal mess would be solved! If only he would socialize more with legislators the way L.B.J. did, his agenda would pass!" Lizza goes on to observe that "the pundits are not alone in assuming that the President is all-powerful," and he credits the president with having "given up on the idea that he has any special powers to change the minds of his fiercest critics."
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