NP: John Cage, 4'33"

Daily Dish guest blogger Jonathan Bernstein has a particularly thought-provoking post about politics vs. policy, which is a meme that's been darting around the Internet a bit lately as it relates to health care. Bernstein cites a writer named Richard Neustadt, who aptly points out that even the best president doesn't really know how policy decisions are going to work in the real world, but they can look for certain indicators that give them hints. I really like the way that theory then gets applied to the health care debate:

Presidents, in order to convince others to do the things that the president wants them to do, must figure out what the people who will administer a program can actually do (which, of course, differs from what they might say they can do -- reading clues is hard). Presidents must figure out who really needs to support something so that it will pass, and know what they will accept (think public option. Who can you afford to lose -- Ben Nelson or Jane Hamsher? And will the inclusion or not of a public option really make one of them walk? What about Howard Dean and Blanche Lincoln, same questions? The answers are not obvious, nor were they at the time).

The bit in parentheses at the end is huge, in my opinion, and particularly refreshing among all the ADD-fueled second-guessing that's gone on through the process. And seeing the complexities and the interdependencies of all the different organs of the body politic that Bernstein then goes on to talk about and figuring out which buttons to push to get the desired outcome is one of those things I've always seen as a strong suit from President Obama. Consequently, it's a huge blind spot for an instant-gratification culture, and a large part of why the 24-hour news cycle can be so consistently unkind to him.