WALL STREET JOURNAL: …A series of forces are converging to change how a president can best hope to have an impact: The nation’s deep and abiding political divide makes political consensus elusive on the biggest issues. A gerrymandered House of Representatives renders Congress virtually irrelevant on some matters. Long-term fiscal constraints make it hard to conjure up traditional government programs, while the public has lost confidence in many conventional government solutions.
Meantime, states, cities and nongovernment organizations are rising as venues for problem-solving. And the emergence of new technology and social media now allow a president to step outside the standard political and media channels to mobilize millions of people and dollars.
Odds are that many of these forces will persist not just through the remainder of President Obama’s term, but into future presidencies. These changes mean the old pattern of exercising presidential power by proposing programs, cajoling Congress into passing them and then setting up a government apparatus to implement them may be giving way to a new pattern in which a president uses the White House as a platform to focus national attention on an issue and to mobilize forces outside Washington to devote time and resources to address it… (more)
