This place has changed. From the top down, it has changed, in what I thought was its purported mission: To elect more and better Democrats, to make government able to pass and sustain legislation that supports liberal goals. Instead, it's mission as become to punish those who fail to be the proper Democrats as defined by this site. And I have never seen anything become better in the long run when it tries to punish those who try.
An article on the front page discussed the debt bill recently passed. The purpose of the article was to go after Obama specifically for not extracting every concession he could have gotten out of the bill, because, obviously, in retrospect, too many Republicans voted for it. And just to make sure you focused on the target of the article, it included a picture of Obama.
it's another in a long series of articles that refuses to acknowledge the difference between negotiating with hostage takers, and negotiating with the House, which is currently controlled by Republicans. But that's not the point, because the real problem with the article is that it fails to go after Republicans at all. The writer refuses, once again, to focus the energy of this site on making sure that Republicans are not elected to office.
I understand that it's easy to do it this way: "He's our president, and if he fails to meet our goals, then it's his fault." It's easy because generally people that agree with you, like the president does, are more willing to listen to your suggestions than those who disagree with you. It's also easy to whine about failing, because then you get to claim you did everything you could, but others just let you down. "I cannot fail, I can only be failed." (Replace I with Conservatism to hear something familiar.)
We cannot do this. Even if Obama isn't negotiating as the world's best negotiator, or if he's not saying every correct thing in his speeches, he is fighting for liberal policies and goals. And our answer to this is not to go after him for failing to reach the bar. It is to go after everyone who is preventing him from reaching our goals. He is not our enemy. The Republicans are.
The article should have focused again and again on how Republicans turned something routine, raising the debt ceiling, into a hostage crisis. We should have seen a timeline showing how, when Obama first asked for a clean debt ceiling bill, the House Republicans mocked him by holding a vote on it that was rigged to fail. It should have listed all of the things that happened up to the point where the current bill passed. This would have been useful, because when i have to talk to those around me - I live in Texas - I can explain what really happened, versus the Fox News version.
Another useful article would be to explain the difference between deficit and debt and a budget and a debt ceiling, and what would have happened if we had defaulted. Those are the kinds of things that I can use as ammunition against Fox and the lies of the Republican party.
I know what some of you will say. There will be disagreements that the only way Obama will get better is if we push him. But you will have missed the point. It is time to go after those who are burning down the house, Obama's failing may be that he's not everything everyone thought. But that's still nothing compared to the evil that is the Republican party, a party willing to destroy the country entirely to have power. And for those of you who argue that evil is too strong of a word, destruction in the pursuit of power is evil.
ETA: Please don't get me wrong. There is always a need for improving things. Always. But the ratio of the FP articles of "Obama didn't do this right" to "The Republicans are wrong for even doing this" has been awfully skewed, especially at or beyond August 2nd.
Update 2: And look, just to further prove my point, the next FP article again goes after Obama for failing to negotiate properly. And it's not about how the Republicans should not be doing this to our economy, it's entirely about how the Obama administration failed. Yes, I know that's how the Republicans are going to do it. But it's still wrong for them to be doing that. At least the article put a picture of McConnell up.