Lack of Presidential Leadership

The Keystone XL oil pipeline extension was proposed in 2008. The build application was filed in the beginning of 2009. On November 10, 2011 President Obama announced “the decision on the pipeline permit would be delayed until at least 2013, pending further environmental review.”

The Obama administration’s top health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius,  on Wednesday overruled the Food and Drug commissioner to block the Plan B emergency contraceptive pill from becoming available to young teens without a prescription. When President Obama lifted federal restrictions on embryonic stem cell research early in his administration, he set a markedly different tone from that of the Bush years, declaring that scientific decisions should be “based on facts, not ideology.”

Deficit reduction committees and proposals have been numerous during the Obama administration:

– The Super Committee of 12 required a mere majority but could not persuade anyone to change sides.

– Republican Alan Simpson, a former U.S. senator from Wyoming, and Democrat Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff to President Clinton, chaired the president’s bipartisan deficit commission that voted 11-7 last December in favor of a plan to save $4 trillion over 10 years. Unfortunately, a supermajority of 14 votes was needed to move the package to Congress.

– Rep. Paul Ryan (R) has proposed the Roadmap for America’s Future, which is a series of budgetary reforms. His January 2010 version of the plan includes partial privatization of Social Security, the transition of Medicare to a voucher system, discretionary spending cuts and freezes, and tax reform.  It was considered too radical by members of both political parties.

What do all of these issues have in common?  The president has been absent.  No one knows what his ideas are.  We all know that he has judiciously avoided taking a position.  All evidence of a lack of leadership.