Politics is a game of addition – successful politics anyway.  Great leaders, when faced with a divided electorate, not to mention difficult economic times, use a limited agenda to forge consensus out of broken paradigms.  Once they achieve an initial success, they seek a broader consensus.  In the 1980’s Reagan faced a divided Republican Party and a fractured and dispirited nation.  Concentrating on the prosperity issue and our national prestige, Reagan first brought Republicans together and then independents and even many Democrats.  Indeed, so successful was Reagan at bringing people together, that in time he could rely on a group of Reagan Democrats.  Few other Presidents have had such success at building consensus let alone are able to claim a voting block from the other party in their name.

There is little doubt that Obama faced a divided electorate when he first took office and a difficult economic climate.  Rather than start with a limited agenda designed to build consensus, Obama did the opposite.  Obama chased too many rabbits at once and preferred ideological fights over practical solutions.  As a result, the Country is more divided than ever – not less.

The most recent manifestation of that divisive M.O. is the White House’s amazing decision to insist on a terror trial in New York.   Of course, it remains a jarring ideological decision to treat KSM as a “criminal” versus the warring “terrorist” that he is.  As I wrote, in my article Internment, CSI and Eric Holder’s Disarming of America, that decision will have profound negative consequences for decades to come.  To the point of this article, Obama is compounding his initial divisive decision (treating him as a criminal) by fighting with New York over the place of the trial.  It is a political fight which he cannot win regardless of the outcome of the trial.

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From the New York Daily News:

The White House ordered the Justice Department to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.

The White House took the action hours after Mayor Bloomberg called Attorney General Eric Holder to say he would “prefer that they did it elsewhere.”

“It would be an inconvenience at the least, and probably that’s too mild a word for people that live in the neighborhood and businesses in the neighborhood,” Bloomberg told reporters.

“There are places that would be less expensive for the taxpayers and less disruptive for New York City.”

State leaders have railed against a plan to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Manhattan federal court since Holder proposed it last month.

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