How Obama could have achieved more real change

The benefits of bold strategies in the past are embodied by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He used the Great Depression to create a New Deal voting coalition that saw the Democrats control the House of Representatives from 1930 to 1994 (with only four years of Republican rule - in 1946 and 1952). Roosevelt and the Democrats passed a massive raft of legislation to protect unions, help the unemployed, widows and the elderly, and to underwrite the banking system.

Some might say that FDR's style, the media politics of the time and the desperation of the Great Depression created opportunities Obama never had but at the very least FDR should have been the template for caricaturing one's opponents.

The second example is Lyndon Baines Johnson, who used the tragedy of John F. Kennedy's death to push Civil Rights legislation through the Congress. He also demonised his conservative opponents as frightening and mean-spirited in a manner that truly (rather than sarcastically) made him "landslide Lyndon" in 1964. Johnson's legislative achievements on health care, anti-poverty measures, education, the environment and many other fronts should also have been Obama's template.

While LBJ faced a much less obstructionist Republican Party than Obama and also had key Republican votes, let's not forget the varmint opposition LBJ confronted from Southern segregationist opponents, generally from within his own party.

In comparison to these two men, Obama looks timid. Remember though that it was LBJ's bullishness that led to America's significant over commitment in Vietnam, a factor that saw Johnson eventually leave a much more mixed political and policy legacy than that of FDR.

However, Obama's failure to borrow more from the most successful Democratic Party politician ever was a strategic error.

The conditions Obama was elected into in 2008 were difficult but they were also the most fertile for a reforming liberal politician since 1980. Obama pushed a reforming agenda along particularly on health care but he lacked the ideological and partisan conviction to effectively bury his opponents for a generation.