Mr. Obama emerges in this volume as an oddly passive chief executive whose modus operandi was to sketch out overarching principles, "wait until others had painted in those outlines with hard proposals" and then "step down from his above-the-fray perch to close the deal".
No, McKelvey says: "I don't see much in the way of hard proposals for reinstituting discipline coming from either side of the aisle".
For Sen. Barack Obama, the same financial crisis that could elevate him to the White House will also provide him with suitable cover to forgo his harder proposals.
He rendered a hard line proposal, first in last November's issue of Foreign Affairs and again on March 26 in a speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.
He cited, for example, a seemingly hard-knuckle proposal for capping pensions for city workers at about $100,000.
The President will be selling a hard-line proposal for immigration reform as something of a compromise.
The future of Medicare, of course, will be a major issue, and Democrats are hitting the Romney-Ryan ticket hard for proposals that will "end Medicare as we know it".
Billy Hunter, the executive di- rector of the union, remains suspicious of the owners' stance, saying he was not sure whether the hard-cap proposal "is real, or whether it's just a strategy for negotiations".
The CBI said the bonus cap would hit the UK hard: "The proposals will damage the competitiveness of the EU's financial services industry, hitting the UK particularly hard, at a time when growth should be the key priority".
But on Tuesday, a relative handful of New Yorkers turned out in the five boroughs and overwhelmingly rejected a hard-fought proposal by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that would have done just that.
