I keep seeing "President Obama's Bipartisan Deficit Reduction Committee" references in headlines and news articles.  I also see left leaning commenters lament the political disaster this is.  On one hand, I can see this from Obama's point of view.  Sure, he formed the committee and picked its members so it is, in that sense, "his."  But he formed the committee and chose the members so that they could put together a proposal for the rest of us to contend with.  It's "Obama's" in the sense that he hired these people.  But it's their work.  That's a subtle but reasonable distincting.  Those of us who work for other people are probably willing to agree that to some extent our bosses are responsible for what we do.  But do we believe our bosses "own" our work or do we like to take credit for our own accomplishments?

Obama seems like a great manager.  He's knows he can't do everything.  He's willing to delegate.  Everything that happens within Obama's administration does not necessarily have the stamp of Obama on it.  He's aware, for sure (Whereas Bush just seems neglectful and not always in charge) and he takes responsibility, but all of this is less personality driven than things were in the Clinton years.

The Obama approach is probably closest to how you should effectively run a big operation.  The Clinton approach is probably closer to how you should run a start-up.  But whatever its merits, the Obama approach has an optics problem since people don't pay a lot of attention to the news.  The President winds up owning everything.

With health care, Obama seemed to employ the classic managerial technique of assigning the problem to the constituency that needed to buy-in.  It certainly stands to reason that a Congressionally designed plan would merit wide Congressional support.  He got a bill passed and of course his name is stuck to it, but it deviates sharply from what his supporters expected Obama healthcare to look like.  He delegated it, they mangled it and he owns the result.

He owns Afghanistan, Iraq, the deficit commission, and TARP and the stimulus.  Of those, only two were formulated by his administration with the stimulus being a direct response to TARP and the economy he inherited and the deficit commission a direct response to having to do the stimulus in the first place.  Sheesh!

What's funny is that the one thing he doesn't own has the best branding.  He doesn't own "The Bush Tax Cuts."  This is hilarious in a way since the only reason these things are expiring is that the Bush White House set them to expire.  Obama probably should have branded this better.  Let them expire but force congress to vote on the Obama Tax Cut For The Middle Class.  Revert to 90s tax rates for income over $250,000 per couple and tax an additional percentage off each bracket below that.  Then at least we'd be debating the Obama Tax Cuts, which has a nice ring to it.

It seems to me that in the ultimate triumph of hope over experience tha Obama is delegating ever more problems to presumably responsible parties who, in the end, don't turn out to be responsible and who leave the President holding the bag for, well... cruddy policy.

I think it's time for less quiet management and more charisma.  Were the President running an organization where, more of less, everyone shared the same goal of progress (even if they define it differently) he could continue to delegate the way he has been.  But he's now running an organization where the Senate Minority Leader's goal is to keep him from winning a second term in office.

It's amazing what these people are going to stick the President with, if Obama lets them.  Obama had better start defining his own presidency.  If the release of Bush's memoirs have shown us anything it's that everyone but Kanye West has forgotten that any of that ever happened.