The power of the Presidency is a topic likely to rear its head in the A2 exam. With that in mind, there is an argument of sorts going on in the Bloggosphere about why Obama is a weak President and why Bush was a strong president.
This posting discusses the limits on the Presidency's power to affect domestic politics, while this one is the reaction and discusses why Obama is a weak President and why Bush was a strong president. The short TL:DR version is that Obama seeks compromise and Bush didn't (it also helped I suppose that President Bush saw domestic policy as part of his "War on Terror"). This post on CBS news discusses how the debt-ceiling negotiations showed Obama at his weakest having caved into most of the Republican's demands. More technical stuff about the deal here from the Washington Post if you're interested.
A news item from the Washington Post about the terms of the deal can be found here.
Plenty of sub-links to follow and info to glean from the links above.
One of them is the article here from the Huffington Post about Obama's presidency and his tactics in office. If you haven't time to read the whole thing, miss out the list of individuals in the middle.
Essentially there are those who supported candidate Obama and are disappointed by his in ability to create change (the US system opposes change). There are those on the right who hate the idea of a Democratic president anyway.
Conversely, this post here at Salon.com says that Obama is playing his hand very well and that he really wasn't a progressive liberal that people thought he was in 2008. Andrew Sullivan here discusses the possibility that President Obama is luring the Republicans into the trap of getting a right-wing "Tea Party" candidate who moderates would dislike rather than a more centrist GOP candidate to run against him in 2012.
What do you think? Is Obama weak or merely not as willing as Bush to impose his wishes in a system which makes in hard to create change?
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