And I agree with him: "The President is losing his base".
It isn’t that Ed Schultz is one of the intellectual elites. It isn’t that I always agree with Ed (or anyone else from the President on down to my sig other) for that matter. And it isn’t that I don’t get pissed with Ed for laying so much on Obama and forgetting the role of Congress, because I do. And I know that Obama was never a raging progressive (unlike what Fake noise would have one believe).
But I do believe that Ed Schultz understands something that Gibbs and all the king’s men seem to have lost somewhere in transition from campaign to presidency: somewhere between Main St. and Wall St: somewhere between Volker and Geithner.
The American people who voted for Obama thought they had a leader for them...and against the corporate forces taking over our world. He was our hope for transparency and truth at the top of the pile. We wanted trickle down straight talking...and straight walking. We wanted leadership as well as transitory hope and rhetoric. We were charged (on fire) ready to work down here at the grass roots...particularly if he showed the way and had our back...as we had his. Maybe our hope was too high and we wanted too much.
TPM writes about this today:
Last night, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz spoke at Minnesota progressive talk radio AM950’s Blue State Bash at the Minneapolis Convention Center. During his remarks, Schultz revealed that he recently had a testy confrontation with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (Gibbs appeared on Schultz’s show this past Thursday). "Mr. Gibbs and I had quite a conversation off the air the other night," he revealed:
For reasons I don’t fully understand (despite 101 diaries on both sides of the topic as to whose fault it is), I agree with Schultz: President Obama is losing his base. And it leaves me dismayed, if only intermittently undaunted.
So when all is said and done: How can Obama get his base back? I doubt if Plouffe has a magic wand...so maybe the President should hear a little more from us when we think he is not walking the walk America needs.