<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" In case you missed it over the weekend, Maureen Dowd came swanning around the op-ed pages of the New York Times again, swooping across the main parlor and sprawling across the staircases, and wondering why the president -- or any president -- just doesn&amp;#039;t come sweeping in and carry her off to the land where pleasure knows no boundaries and rapture no frontiers. Or something. Actually, she was writing about gun control. And Aaron Sorkin movies. President Obama has watched the blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, as Yeats wrote, and he has learned how to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments, as he did from the White House late Friday night after the second bombing suspect was apprehended in Boston. Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern. Holy mother of god, you can break an ankle in the middle of that passage. How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It&amp;#039;s because he doesn&amp;#039;t know how to work the system. And it&amp;#039;s clear now that he doesn&amp;#039;t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.  Uh, I dunno. Maybe because the Senate is uniquely suited by its very structure and rules -- one might even say, it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;system&amp;quot; -- to be hijacked by crazy people? Or because Mitch McConnell is afraid that, somewhere in Kentucky, there&amp;#039;s a wildeyed bastard of a state representatibe with his name on him? It&amp;#039;s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.  No, it&amp;#039;s actually not. It&amp;#039;s the way the &amp;quot;system&amp;quot; is supposed to work. Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls.  I am Maureen Dowd and I will print absolutely anything, even a non sequitur based on the idle talk of a bunch of crazy ruminants from the other side of the capitol. President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that&amp;#039;s not how adults with power respond to things. He chooses not to get down in the weeds and pretend he values the stroking... No, wait, stop. I&amp;#039;m begging you. ...and other little things that matter to lawmakers.  Whew. That was a close one. Now she&amp;#039;s just being stupid, instead of something that could have been so much worse. What, precisely, should the president have done to bring, say, Tom Coburn or Pat Roberts, or even the inexcusable Ms. Heitkamp, over to his side here? What stroking would be involved? No, hold on. Don&amp;#039;t answer that. The White House should have created a war room full of charts with the names of pols they had to capture, like they had in &amp;quot;The American President.&amp;quot; Soaring speeches have their place, but this was about blocking and tackling. Instead of the pit-bull legislative aides in Aaron Sorkin&amp;#039;s movie, Obama has Miguel Rodriguez, an arm-twister so genteel that The Washington Post&amp;#039;s Philip Rucker wrote recently that no one in Congress even knows who he is. Michael J. Fox is a pit bull? David Paymer is a pit bull? And, while I hate to argue on this level, you may recall that, in the movie, because the president is shtupping Annette Bening, the White House is losing the vote on the bill. Then the president gives a big, tough press conference, and he gets Annette back -- Yay! -- but, by the end of the film, as MoDo is swooning in her seat and pricing drapes for the Lincoln Bedroom, he still doesn&amp;#039;t have a gun control bill. The president was oblivious to red-state Democrats facing tough elections. Bring the Alaskan Democrat Mark Begich to the White House residence, hand him a drink, and say, &amp;quot;How can we make this a bill you can vote for and defend?&amp;quot;  Of course, the bill in question was already tailored to meet the specifications of people like Begich, who likely wouldn&amp;#039;t have voted for any gun-control bill that might, you know, control guns no matter how drunk you got him. Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, is one of the few people on the Hill that the president actually considers a friend. Obama wrote a paean to Coburn in the new Time 100 issue, which came out just as Coburn sabotaged his own initial effort to help the bill. Obama should have pressed his buddy: &amp;quot;Hey, Tom, just this once, why don&amp;#039;t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You&amp;#039;re not running again. Do something big.&amp;quot; Poof! Magic! There were ways to get to 60 votes. Name one that doesn&amp;#039;t involve a Hollywood movie, a reasonable Tom Coburn, a drunk Mark Begich, or any other fictional device. The White House just had to scratch it out with a real strategy and a never-let-go attitude.  Eye of the tiger, Rock! Eye of the tiger! He never calls. He never writes. He never rides in and throws her across his mighty steed. Life is full of disappointments. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18239/in-which-modo-seeks-a-manly-m/>