Irked Liberal Lion

“If you widen the lens, the public is being sold a big lie — that our problems owe to unions and the size of government and not to fraud and deregulation and vast concentration of wealth. Obama’s failure is that he won’t challenge this Republican narrative, and give people a story that helps them connect the dots and understand where we’re going.”

I agree with that assessment. Why the President won't fight is a mystery: yes, he's a conciliator, not a pugilist; his game is basketball, not football. He gives some speeches where he calls his opponents hostage-takers. But he does fight.



“Obama had a chance to reboot the bailout,” he says. “He could have said to the bankers, ‘If you want more, you’ve got to put a cap on salaries, you’ve got to agree to modify X number of mortgages.’ ” Mr. Reich sees a parallel with his former boss, Mr. Clinton, and draws no comfort from the comparison. Confronted with a muscular Republican majority in the House in 1994, Mr. Clinton mastered triangulation, which is to say he sailed into a sea neither Republican nor Democratic. It was a strategic masterstroke, but he threw overboard some liberal founding stones. “I found myself truly impressed by how quickly Clinton moved to the putative center,” says Mr. Reich, a touch archly. Mr. Reich sees President Obama taking a similar tack. This argument drives the president and his advisers to distraction.

Yes, he has accomlished a good number of things, and his advisers point to: health care and financial reform, to extended unemployment benefits and to the stimulus bills (which liberal economists criticized as too small) that let city and state governments avoid tens of thousands of layoffs. They will put their accounting up against that of their critics.

At the same time that Reich and Krugman call Obama too timid, the Republicans call him a dangerous radical socialist Kenyan.