And of course it is also shaped by other forces--external ones like the Congress, the news media, the economy and wars etc. But even then the strongest element is what the person who is president brings to the table--and the people he or she (hope springs eternal) brings with him/her.

I have to say as long as I've been voting, I've never had high hopes for the liberalism of any Dem elected and I was always correct. But I let myself nurture a tiny, tiny tiny hope that Obama would deliver something much better than he has. Not that I ever thought he was liberal. I looked at his actions/votes, didn't listen to the campaign rhetoric as much. Never do, frankly, with any pol running for prez.

"To do so, they think he must forge partnerships with Republicans on key issues and make noticeable progress on his oft-repeated campaign pledge to change the ways of Washington.

Even more important, senior administration officials said, Obama will need to oversee tangible improvements in the economy."

Change is inevitable, life IS change -- but individuals, communities, countries can accept and respond to change, take action to manage it and encourage it in a direction they prefer. Or, they can resist it, condemn it, fear it and reap the inevitable failures and ill consequences of doing so.

If we have a small president it is because we have become a very small people -- unable to develop intelligent policies for our future because we have spent too many decades trying to stop history and wallowing in self pity nostallgia for a long gone, and in many aspects non-existent, past.

I don't think we even have a language anymore that can allow us, as a nation, to think about, discuss and plan for "progress."

+BakedDemocrat or GrilledRepublican:  
$100.00

The cannibal called the waiter over and asked,
"Why such a high price for the Politicians?"

Look at the things he has used his power to do, or to legitimize, and look at the issues where we, the people, believe he has failed or is failing.  What do you notice?  

What I notice is a fairly wide authoritarian streak, and a fair amount of antipathy for the people's interests; if a particular decision shifts the balance of power toward the people, he backs away - if it strengthens executive power, he's all over it.

This nonsense that there's little he can do is just another form of denial, and one more way for people who got suckered by his sales job to save what's left of their face.  I get that - I mean, who wants to admit they were wrong about the guy?  Who wants to admit that the signs were always there, and they chose to ignore them?

So, knowing that he has the power, it comes down to admitting that he isn't planning to use it in ways we feel a Democratic president should, and trying to figure out other ways to get what we want.  Looks to me like the Congress is pretty much our only option, and then it's a matter of figuring out if the Democratic caucus is ready or willing to break ranks with Obama, act like the independent body they are, and do what's right for the people.

I know - fat chance, right?

Only Obama can decide this about himself, but others can influence the outcome by surrounding him with tough love and new circumstances created by their own direct actions. It does not help Obama to keep telling him he did great but the people misunderstood him. He did lousy, not great, and in many governing dimensions people understood his failures clearly enough. They knew he gave tons of money to bankers and demanded nothing in return. They knew he thought the economy was in recovery. They couldn't believe this intelligent man was that clueless.

Popular forces can blow away the fuzziness. They can mobilize to demonstrate visible support for the president's loftier goals and to warn him off the temptation to pursue a Clintonesque appeasement of the right. Given the fragile status of his presidency, Obama needs to know that caving in is sure to encourage enemies and drive off disheartened supporters. People should, likewise, call out the president's enemies and attack them with the harshness that's out of character for him. The racial McCarthyism of the GOP establishment is a good place to start.

People who still have great hope for Obama can help revive his presidency, but only if they toughen up themselves. Stop holding his hand (he's an adult) and start building a people's agenda that compels the president to change his. Obama won't like this at first--his own supporters talking back--but he can learn to draw strength from their courage. If people fail to step up with their own message, the president will likely fail with his. link

In other words, he's a powerless president because he is noble and principled.

In his hierarchy of principles, I guess sitting around waiting for Congress to send him something to sign or veto is preferable to seizing the bully pulpit and using his once-in-a-generation oratorical skills to challenge Americans to turn off the talk radio and get behind legislation that would actually benefit them instead of the banksters and assorted other "titans." That would be unseemly and over-reaching.

I did not touch the retirement age, change the way inflation is scored for Social Security, or further restrict eligibility for disability benefits. I don't believe it is necessary to do those things -- but even more important, I think that to doing them in this economic climate would create great social pain and work against economic recovery.

For similar reasons I did not eliminate earmarks, farm subsidies or reduce the federal workforce or its pay. I also did not reduce the Navy and Air Force fleets. You can make credible arguments for wastefulness in all of these things -- and in better times I might want to readdress these decisions. But, in today's economic environment, these kind of eliminations and reductions would cause much more dramatic and painful hardships for the American middle and working class than I think most people realize. In my experience, Americans are very deluded about how much their own economic well being and that of their region, industry, etc., is dependent on federal spending and support. Cutting the number of federal employees, for instance, could mean cutting some of the only dependable middle class jobs in many small towns in the country's less populated regions.

More often, Obama projects a demeanor of unruffled cool: he can handle the pressures and demands of the job just fine (how could he suggest otherwise?), and he didn't run for office "to pass on our problems to the next president or the next generation." But the issue is not Obama, it's the office. Aides to George W. Bush make similar complaints about the demands on the executive. "It was a much different place than even during the Bush Sr. administration," says Joe Hagin, Bush 43's deputy chief of staff, who also worked for Reagan and Bush 41. "There was much less time [under the second Bush] to catch your breath during the day." He recalls the constant juggling of issues--from the wars to Katrina--often all at the same time. "There's only so much bandwidth in the organization," he says.

Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency? Obama has looked to many models of leadership, including FDR and Abraham Lincoln, two transformative presidents who governed during times of upheaval. But what's lost in those historical comparisons is that both men ran slim bureaucracies rooted in relative simplicity. Neither had secretaries of education, transportation, health and human services, veterans' affairs, energy, or homeland security, nor czars for pollution or drug abuse, nor televisions in the West Wing constantly tuned to yammering pundits. They had bigger issues to grapple with, but far less managing to do. "Lincoln had time to think," says Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University. "That kind of downtime just doesn't exist anymore."

Among a handful of presidential historians NEWSWEEK contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated. "The growth is exponential in these last 50 years, especially the number of things that are expected of the president," says presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, who had dinner with Obama and a handful of other historians last summer. Obama aides speaking on background say that the president's inner circle can become stretched by the constant number of things labeled "crises" that land on his desk--many of which, like the mistaken firing of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod in Georgia or the intricacies of the oil cleanup in the gulf, could easily be handled by lower-level staff. "Some days around here, it can almost be hard to breathe," says one White House official who didn't want to go on the record portraying his boss as overwhelmed. Another senior adviser says that sometimes the only way to bring the president important news is to stake out his office and "walk and talk" through the hall.

The growth of the presidency has been a sort of Catch-22. Most presidents after Roosevelt, at least until the Vietnam era, got by with only a few dozen advisers. Ted Sorensen, the Kennedy speechwriter who died last month, was actually hired as a domestic-policy counselor, one of only a handful (he wrote speeches in his spare time). Today there are more than 35 staffers devoted to domestic policy, plus more who parachute in on particular issues, like health care or energy. Yet as the president's responsibilities have grown, the instinct has been to hire more people to help manage the work, including the flow of information. "That's wrong; the more people you have in the White House, the more problems are sucked into it," says James Pfiffner, a George Mason University professor of public policy whose 2007 book, The Modern Presidency, examined the enormous growth of the office. Other historians point to the changing role of cabinet secretaries. While Obama has more department leaders than ever before--15, compared with Gerald Ford's 11 and Lincoln's 7--many of them have less power and influence, which has required minor decisions about trade, energy, and economic strategy to be handled by White House staffers.