He's always had game, Howie

Howard Fineman is starting to catch on.

People who play basketball with Barack Obama say he's more dogged than flashy, more determined than skillful, more adaptable than unique. He'll trash talk on a dribble-drive with Reggie Love, but in the old days he was a studious, unselfish passer with classroom colleagues at Harvard Law.

And often, they say, he ended up with more points than you thought he'd have. No one noticed until it was over.

As in basketball, so it is now: his life on the court is a parallel to the first two years of his up-and-down-and-now-sort-of-up-again presidency.

It hasn't been pretty; it certainly hasn't been easy. Pundits, including this one, have dismissed him as a lousy negotiator, a dreamy academic or worse. He's been a New Dealer one minute, Reaganite the next. He's been rigidly partisan one minute and too eager to cut a deal with the Republicans leadership the next.

He's been called a Socialist by the Tea Party and a Wall Street toady by MoveOn. His public standing is weak; the public thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction. Beltway-wise guys think he can be had.

But through dogged patience, and adaptable style and a refusal to panic, the president has piled up the longest list of new laws, treaties and administrative actions anyone has seen here in decades.

As I've said here, here, and here, you're going to miss Obama's game if you're looking for a sprint instead of a long distance race. This week we just saw some of the culmination of the distance game. As an example, Gail Collins points this out.

But let’s admit it. Nothing would have gotten done if Obama hadn’t swallowed that loathsome compromise on tax cuts for the wealthy.

If he’d taken the high road, Congress would be in a holiday war. The long-term unemployed would be staggering into the new year without benefits. The rest of the world would look upon the United States as a country so dysfunctional that it can’t even ratify a treaty to help keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. The people who worked at ground zero would still be uncertain about their future, and our gay and lesbian soldiers would still be living in fear.

It’s depressing to think that there was no way to win that would not have involved giving away billions of dollars to people who don’t need it. But it’s kind of cheery to think we have a president who actually does know what he’s doing.

Also - do we think the Start Treaty would have gotten all of those Republican votes if Obama hadn't been relentless in getting the entire Republican national security team on board? Do we think DADT repeal would have passed if he hadn't worked with Gates to get almost the entire military establishment on board? These things take time and patience. And this week we saw the fruit of those efforts.

As an aside, Fineman's reference to Obama's basketball game reminded me of the story Michelle Obama told about taking him home to meet her family. She says her brother always wanted to play basketball with her beau's because they thought that was the best way to get a read on the guy. Obama apparently passed with flying colors.