Mr. President, It's Time to Fish or Cut Bait.

By John Ballard

A rump Congress presents a perfect opportunity for Barack Obama to show some grit. Both parties are in a state of disorder, the country is all over the place politically, Republican politicians at the state level will be stacking the deck for the next ten years as new districts are gerrymandered into shape following the 2010 census.  There is no reason to believe Democrats will have anything other than weaker influence. No matter what he does, the president has nothing to lose. There may never be a better time to exercise his powers as chief executive.

Katrina vanden Heuvel ticked off a few items about which the president can be pro-active, citing a 54-page report released by the Center for American Progress.

The highlights:

1. Use EPA regulatory authority to reduce greenhouse gas pollution by 17 percent by 2020.
2. Launch the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency with aggressive rulemaking to protect and empower consumers.
3. Accelerate the implementation of the Small Business Jobs Act so that small businesses can begin hiring again more quickly.
4. Build a new website that promotes government transparency by tracking all public expenditures in real time.
5. Use the authority of the commander in chief to mitigate DADT�s impact should Congress fail to repeal it.
6. Appoint a special commission to assess the government�s use of independent contractors like Blackwater.
7. Direct agencies to require automatic mediation to avoid foreclosures where possible.
8. Implement the Affordable Care Act while working with the private sector on payment reforms.
9. Create a national awareness campaign on workplace flexibility.
10. Simplify access to federal antipoverty programs.

Not included in the report, but included in my own list: End the war in Afghanistan.

The president can also use his executive authority to advance labor organizing, as my colleague Chris Hayes points out here.

Progressives should keep this all in mind. Over the next two years, we are sure to hear the administration tell us that it cannot get anything accomplished while Republicans controlling the House. Let this report serve as a reminder that they can. All they need is a little courage�and some genuine presidential leadership.

You have other options, Mr. President.

You might want to spend the next ten or twelve weeks waiting for seeds already planted to sprout and grow into magnificent solutions to our many problems. But you need to remind yourself that not much will grow in winter when the ground is cold and frozen. Rather like Washington politics year round.

To help you get motivated take time to look at James Verini's piece in the Boston Globe finding many parallels between you and another one-term president, the first President Bush. (Oops, did I say another one term president? Sorry about that. It just slipped out.)

...there is a recent one-term president he resembles. George H.W. Bush doesn�t often come up in discussions of Obama, but two years into Obama�s term, the two presidents� tenures bear a striking resemblance. So too do their governing styles and temperaments, and even, unlikely though it may seem, their speech. Here are two leaders �buffeted by circumstance,� as the presidential historian Bert Rockman characterized Bush, whose same signal qualities in repulsing buffets and discussing them with the public � sobriety, patience, and, yes, prudence, to use Bush-impersonator Dana Carvey�s favorite Bushism � are often enough their least appreciated.

But why attempt the comparison at all? Isn�t analyzing the doings of one White House frustrating enough? Were we able to travel back in time and stand behind each of the 44 presidents as they went about a day in office, we�d no doubt find the diversity of problems they faced and the ways they faced them makes drawing parallels laughable. Despite working in the Oval Office, each successive occupant of it is a nonpareil.

Still, the practice feels necessary. Why? Most simply, because comparison is how we learn, how we judge. Comparing Obama to Carter, even if it�s to express disfavor, is a way of fitting him into a group, of trying to understand him and the challenges of his job. It�s a way of familiarizing him. That Obama is the first African-American president makes this impulse all the stronger. Similarly, while presidents have been compared since John Adams succeeded George Washington, when we�re talking about a young president with scant public record prior to his election, past presidential performances are one of the few available yardsticks.

So let�s compare, first, those historical buffets. In the first year of Bush�s term, he was beset by three unforeseen calamities that are eerily resonant. First was the savings & loan crisis. Facilitated by deregulation and a mortgage bubble, the S&L crisis threatened the country�s banking system by the time of Bush�s inaugural. Unpopular though he knew the move would be, Bush and Congress put together a massive tax-funded rescue. The public didn�t understand the disastrous alternative scenario, and the move was assailed as a bailout of reckless bankers.

Then, in the spring of 1989, student-led protestors began assembling in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and in June Chinese police and soldiers took to beating and murdering them. Like Obama, Bush came into office with higher than average respect from foreign leaders, but he had to shelve plans to improve American-Chinese relations, a blow to his larger ambitions to redefine American engagement with the Communist world. He cut off diplomatic ties to China after Tiananmen, but, a committed internationalist, he believed engagement was eventually the right strategy. He was roundly criticized for not doing enough to support the protestors.

That didn�t turn as many people against him as what was, until this year, the worst man-made natural disaster in American history. In March of 1989 the Exxon Valdez spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. Since �everybody now expects the man inside the White House to do something about everything,� as the presidential historian Richard Neustadt observed in his study �Presidential Power,� Bush, a former oilman, bore only somewhat less blame than Exxon.

Jump to 2009-10: The Troubled Asset Relief Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus, are seen by many Americans as bailouts, not legitimate attempts to stave off economic catastrophe. (TARP was created by the George W. Bush administration, but according to recent polls two-thirds of Americans attribute it to Obama.) Obama, who has arrived in office with the hopes of foreign leaders and populations riding high, wants to redefine relations with, most of all, the Muslim world, but before he has the chance there are protests, and then violent crackdowns, in Tehran. (Unlike the crisis Carter faced in 1979, this was not a revolution, and the Iranian government was in no danger of crumbling.) He is criticized for not expressing enough support for the protestors, criticism that pales in comparison to that of his handling of the BP oil spill.

George H. W. Bush came into office facing what many economists called the worst economic downturn since the Depression, accompanied by a collapse in the real estate market and a Wall Street racked by scandal and stock market decline. He succeeded a president, Ronald Reagan, who staked his reputation on limited government while expanding it in certain costly areas, particularly the military, leaving record deficits. Though Bush would have liked to do more in domestic policy, he was constrained not just by money, but by a widespread public conviction, inflamed by Reagan, that government �is the problem.� Bush pollster Robert Teeter recognized this early on, seeing that while Americans were revolted by the �private interest� excesses of the Reagan era � as Bush himself was � they were also unwilling to embrace the �public purpose� alternative.

Twenty years later, Obama followed on the heels of a self-proclaimed Reagan Republican whose tenure ended in straits like those Reagan�s had. And Obama faced the same conundrum: He campaigned on the promise of a renewed sense of public purpose, and perhaps the most fundamental misreading of the public he made was thinking that what even many conservatives wanted, after George W. Bush, was not smaller government but rather more competent big government. Long before they�d occurred, the 2010 elections were deemed a rejection of that notion.

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It's time for Barack Obama to make one of the most important decisions of his political career: Two years into the presidency will he do and say what it takes to define himself and his legacy, or will he leave that most important feature of his career to be decided by others?