While it might seem crazy to compare a wiser and wizened president entering his seventh year in office to the callow, Next Big Thing of his U.S. Senate days, Obama is now inhabiting the psychological head-space of his early career on the national political scene. Now as then, he can legitimately describe himself as an underdog. He feels at liberty to address any topic he chooses on his own terms — race, for instance — and, most importantly, he’s increasingly untethered from what he views as a petty, geriatric Democratic establishment he originally crusaded against as a presidential candidate in 2007.
Obama is sure to strike the usual let’s-work-together tone at Friday’s press conference, but it’s clear to anyone who follows him closely that the president is trying to escape from the Washington sausage works and define his own agenda.
“’Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose’ — Barack and Bobby McGee,” says former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry. “President Obama is free to take the risks and use executive authority that will either make him a much more popular president with rising approval rates or get him impeached by a Republican Congress that won’t be able to control itself. We can contemplate the possibility of each result while smoking a Cuban cigar.”…
The hallmark of Obama’s two presidential campaigns – especially in 2008 – was a rigorous internal discipline that often gave him the element of surprise in launching new policy initiatives, attacks or bold pronouncements (His 2008 Philadelphia race speech, delivered in the middle of the primary fight, was a classic, unexpected, Obamaian bold stroke). At the moment, he seems to have regained a touch of the old audacity and stealth: The Cuba decision, unlike the immigration order, wasn’t leaked and hit like a political lightening bolt, scrambling the 2016 Republican field and forcing a rare clear position from Hillary Clinton.
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