Claire McCaskill calls herself a “friend and supporter” of Barack Obama.
But the Democratic U.S. senator from Missouri has issued a candid assessment of the job her fellow Democrat has done as president of the United States.
The president’s major failing, according to McCaskill? He did not learn how to work with Congress.
The Hill reports on McCaskill’s remarks about Obama: “But one of the president’s shortcomings is that sometimes he sees the world through his eyes and doesn’t do, I think, enough work on being empathetic about how other people view things.”
In truth, McCaskill might be a bit behind the curve when critiquing the job the president has done.
I don’t think he’d mind my saying this, but a now-retired college administrator told me much the same thing during the president’s first term in office.
Former Amarillo College President Paul Matney and I were having lunch one day when Matney lamented the president’s testy relationship with congressional leaders. Matney wished that the president would employ the skill that the late President Lyndon Johnson used to great effect.
Johnson, of course, rose from the Senate to the executive branch of government, as Obama has done. LBJ served as vice president from 1961 until Nov. 22, 1963. Then he became president in the wake of tragedy.
When LBJ moved into the Oval Office, he harnessed all his legislative skill to shepherd landmark legislation through Congress. He was a master of working not just with fellow Democrats, but with Republicans.
Matney bemoaned that President Obama had not developed that kind of bipartisan rapport and it cost him dearly.
McCaskill now — near the end of Barack Obama’s presidency — echoes much of what Paul Matney said years ago. LBJ’s legacy, which was tainted for many years after he left office in 1969 by the Vietnam War, is beginning to look better all the time.
He understood that he needed the legislative branch to make government work, that he couldn’t do it all alone.
As Sen. McCaskill has noted, Barack Obama hasn’t seemed to have learned that lesson.