The purpose of this diary is neither to extol President Obama’s job performance, nor to denigrate it. I just have a couple of items I’d like to present, with some commentary. (I used the search engine to see whether this is redundant of previous work. I didn't find anything indicating that it is, at least not too flagrantly. If I'm wrong about that, I apologize.)
- Sam Youngman, at
The Hill, on
what he’s hearing about the administration’s direction:
While that sounds like the basis for Triangulation 101 and a feel-good Washington story of sacrifice for the common good, all liberals hear is more of Obama giving while Republicans take...
If the White House is worried about further angering its base, aides certainly aren’t showing it.
White House officials do not take seriously any talk, no matter how preliminary, of a credible primary challenge to the president, and the larger view is that the more Obama is seen as a centrist, the better off he’ll be.
Liberals, they think, can shut up and get on board to help Obama paint the portrait of moderation the White House is hoping to have framed before November 2012.
- And Mike Lux, at
Open Left, though writing from a substantially different perspective, has an at least
somewhat similar take:
The way Obama reacts to (the deficit commission report), in particular, will be one of the most consequential and politically significant early signs over which path the administration wants to take going forward. If they decide to embrace this report, as many people are predicting, it means they have decided to choose the DC centrist path toward political rehabilitation: get the Washington Post, the Third Way, and DC establishment all excited, and hope all that excitement trickles down to real voters someday.
Frustrating? Even infuriating? I readily confess that for me, it is. But I occasionally try to imagine what things might seem like from the other guy’s point of view...in this case, that of Barack Obama, himself.
Let’s say you did a few terms in the Illinois State Senate (1997-2004)...were elected to the US Senate beginning 2005 and, voila, virtually out of nowhere, before long you’re the first non-white President of the United States. Moreover, you easily defeated a bona-fide war hero for the job. And, your first two years in the White House include the most substantial record of accomplishment in almost half a century.
In short, things have been working out pretty well for you, doing it your way.
Then, would you be inclined to pay a lot of attention to those wailing endlessly that you’re screwing it all up? Especially in the face of polling showing that those doing the wailing represent all of nine percent of the US populace? (Page 3 of the linked item. I, personally, am emphatically part of that 9%.)
I must say, I probably wouldn’t, either.
(Cross-posted from MN Progressive Project, where my username is dan.burns.)