the main thing about reelection, we tend to think nobly that presidents shouldn t focus on being re-elected. trying to say that your quality of achievement depends very significantly on being re-elected. you have that much more opportunity to appoint justices and all the rest. everything you did in the first term is looked at retroactively in a different way depending on the verdict of the reelection run. you also write about president truman s approach to reelection which was to blame the gop for being obstructionist. you question whether this president fell into this approach or a planned approach. which one? for the first year or so, it may have been in retrospect a somewhat naive and overtrusting approach. if in the fall s election, the president is able to position himself as the reasonable person, the one who can appeal to the center while the republicans are fighting in a smaller and smaller contested area of their conservative wing,
president will have to deal with on a number of different issues. there will be some common ground, trade deals, south korea s trade deal, perhaps colombia, there will be some spending cuts decisions that will be appealing to the administration as this president tries to reach out to independents ahead of a reelection run, of course, in 2012. jon: you mentioned that he is not dennis hastert, he s not news gingrich, but he s not nancy pelosi, either. what kind of changes can we expect from the previous speaker of the house? well, nancy pelosi is going to have to unify her democratic caucus which is as you know much more liberal than it was the last congress. she had a lot of moderate members, blue dog democrats in the last congress, now she controls a caucus that is much more like her, much more liberal. the question is how far they will go on compromising on some of these issues that come to the forefront, how far on spending cuts will some of those democrats vote. we ll see a lot mo
and the tax expired for this year at the end of last year and technically congress has to get on board with just that. and then on top, the bush tax cuts start expiring and people do not want their taxes to go up, but the bigger question, how will the next leader of this country fix our fiscal situation? adam, does it come down to that? ultimately, listen, i know that this is something, a center piece of president obama s reelection run, all about taxing the rich and those who don t pay their fair share, but do you think, first of all, that s the solution? and do you think it s going to resonate on main street at the end of the day? well, one of the issues of main street is, are these very soft, sort of large issues that you raised, people don t like, they think there s too much government. he think this there s too much they don t want it pay taxes. on the other side of that, inequality, the rich don t pay their fair share and so on. i think what you saw in georgia, for example,