Is President Obama an Adaptive Leader?

Consider the President: Sinking in the polls. The country in immense economic distress. Increasingly criticized by supporters for lack of backbone and faulty judgment. Condemned by all Republicans and called a traitor by some... despite his efforts to create recovery policies based on a bipartisan concensus.

Could he in any way be called an Adaptive Leader?

It all depends on what he does over the next few months.

...Roosevelt won re-election in the midst of the Great Depression not by convincing voters his opponents would make the economic situation worse but by demonstrating his utter determination to return the nation to prosperity, no matter what obstacles he had to overcome.

Obama and his advisers know very well that this is the wrong time to cut government spending. They know that using federal money to seed big new initiatives -- to upgrade the nation's crumbling infrastructure, jump-start the "clean" energy industry, retrain the unemployed so they can compete in tomorrow's job market -- would give the economy a much-needed boost...

...It is hard to overstate how apprehensive most Americans are about the future. Boldness from the president may or may not get the nation's mojo working again. Timidity surely won't.

Eugene Robinson