Stupid is as Stupid Does

With absolute power, Team Obama grows stupid

By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
February 10, 2010

(AP photo)

How could such smart people do so many stupid things? That question, or variations on it, is being asked in Washington and around the country about the Obama administration.

The same people who directed the campaign that defeated Hillary Clinton and routed John McCain, a campaign that raised far more money and attracted far more volunteers than any before it, have within a year come up with a legislative program that is crashing in ruins and that, to judge from recent polls, has left the Democratic party weaker than I have seen it in almost 50 years of closely following politics.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/With-absolute-power_-Team-Obama-grows-stupid-83945567.html#ixzz0fCoqDCnP



This blog is © Janet Crain

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Am I Blue........?????

The Blue Dogs flunk obedience school

Fiscally conservative Democrats, not Republicans, are Obama's real obstacle on the road to healthcare reform

By Mike Madden

AP Photo/Ron Edmonds

President Obama speaks on healthcare reform at the White House Tuesday.

July 22, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- The moment had finally come, Tuesday afternoon, for President Obama to follow through on a pledge that he'd taken some heat for making during last year's campaign: He would meet, and negotiate on key issues, with enemies, no matter how vile they might seem to be. Which is how a group of conservative Blue Dog Democrats from the House found themselves invited into the Oval Office to chat about healthcare policy for an hour.

As the White House tries to stir itself into action to keep Obama's chief domestic policy priority from going off the rails, the administration is finding that its biggest problem isn't Republicans. Sure, the GOP opposes the healthcare reform plans moving through Congress, but what else is new? The GOP has opposed everything Obama's tried to do in his first six months in office. The complaints the White House is trying to accommodate now are coming from conservative and moderate Democrats.

In the House, a group of Blue Dogs have basically held legislation hostage, leveraging their numbers on the one committee in that chamber that has yet to pass a bill, the Energy and Commerce panel. In the Senate, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and a handful of moderate Democrats are engaged in painstaking, secretive talks with moderate Republicans in an effort to draft a proposal that might win bipartisan support. None of the senators involved in the talks would discuss them with reporters this afternoon, but they insisted they were doing the right thing. "What we're doing in this group is working very methodically," said Sen. Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who's pushing for "co-ops" instead of a government-run public health insurance option in the reform. "We're not impatient, we're trying to get this job done in the right way so it can stand review and stand scrutiny."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/22/healthcare?source=newsletter


© Janet Crain

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Liberal Left Learning Lesson

In Barack we trust?
Obama campaigned on his personality and judgment and won. Now, like it or not, he isn't beholden to anyone.

By David Sirota

Nov. 29, 2008 Judging by the proliferation of capital letters in the e-mail correspondence I receive, many seem worried that Barack Obama may not deliver the promised "change we can believe in."

After voters rejected the mantra of free trade and deregulation, some of those contacting me say they are upset that Obama is hiring so many free-trading deregulators who birthed today's economic mess.

With the president-elect having touted his opposition to the Iraq war, some are bothered "that Obama's national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views," as the Los Angeles Times reports.

Others recall Obama's insistence that "change doesn't come from Washington; change comes to Washington," and say they are dismayed that his government will be run by Washington insiders. And still others are confused that Obama championed a progressive platform but, as the Nation's Chris Hayes notes, "not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive" has been floated for a major Cabinet position.

To my fearful letter writers, I offer three responses.

First, I counsel not fretting too much yet. Although there is truth to the notion that "personnel is policy," crises can make radicals out of former establishmentarians, and the president-elect's initial declarations imply a boldly progressive agenda. "Remember, Franklin Roosevelt gave no evidence in his prior career that he would lead the dramatic sea change in American politics that he led," says historian Eric Rauchway.

Second, I tell e-mailers they are right to be somewhat distressed, right to ignore Obama loyalists who want them to shut up, and right to speak out. When President Bill Clinton rammed George H.W. Bush's NAFTA through Congress after candidate Clinton pledged not to, he provided ample reason to recollect the saying "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." And voicing concern is critical. As Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without demand."

Finally, I ask my pen pals if they really are shocked.
Despite the election's progressive mandate, Obama is not what Ronald Reagan was to conservatives -- he is not as much the product of a movement as he is a movement unto himself. He figured out that because many "progressive" institutions are merely Democratic Party appendages and not ideological movement forces, he could build his own movement. He succeeded in that endeavor thanks to the nation's Bush-inspired desire for change, his own skills and a celebrity-obsessed culture.

Though many Obama supporters feel strongly about particular issues, and though polling shows the country moving left, the Obama movement undeniably revolves around the president-elect's individual stardom -- and specifically, the faith that he will make good decisions, whatever those decisions are. With that kind of following, Obama likely feels little obligation to hire staff intimately involved in non-Obama movements -- especially those who might challenge a Washington ruling class he may not want to antagonize.

This is the mythic "independence" we're supposed to crave -- a czar who doesn't owe anyone. It is the foreseeable result of the Dear Leader-ism prevalent in foreign autocracies but never paramount in America until now -- and it will have its benefits and drawbacks.

Wielding his campaign's massive e-mail list, the new president could mobilize supporters to press Congress for a new New Deal. Or, he could mobilize that army to blunt pressure on his government for a new New Deal. The point is that Obama alone gets to choose -- that for all the talk of "bottom-up" politics, his movement's structure grants him a top-down power that no previous president had.

For better or worse, that leaves us relying more than ever on our Dear Leader's impulses. Sure, we should be thankful when Dear Leader's whims serve the people -- but also unsurprised when they don't.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/11/29/obama_choices/index.html?source=newsletter

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