David Atkins highlights two reactions to the S&P downgrade, one from a Republican and one from this Democratic administration:
“It happened on your watch, Mr. President,” Representative Michele Bachmann said, drawing applause at an afternoon rally in Iowa. “You were AWOL. You were missing in action.”
The White House blamed Washington’s polarized political climate for the downgrade. “We must do better to make clear our nation’s will, capacity and commitment to work together to tackle our major fiscal and economic challenges,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said in a statement.
Atkins responds:
That is simply awful. Bachmann's rhetoric is as emotional, crisp, understandable and clear as it insanely misguided. It is a strong message with a clear point. The Administration's messaging is confusing, lacks all emotional clarity, and is redolent of weakness. Not once in the Administration's response to the S&P downgrade did they mention the word "Republican." There is no fight left in the Administration, no driving narrative, no emotional core on which to hang one's hat except a continued and desperate clutch at the brass ring of "compromise." Whatever that means.
If these are really the messaging positions going into 2012, progressives might as well ignore the presidential election and focus on winning local races instead.
Then Atkins points us to Drew Weston to reinforce the blandness of Obama and his administration:
Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. ... [emphasis mine]
The real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes...
Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.
In 2008 this country needed new leadership, competent leadership. We took a chance on an inspiring, charismatic, but inexperienced politician who happened to be a person of color, which gave his election an almost storybook flavor. But like George Bush before him, Barack Obama has turned out to be all hat and no cattle. So what do we do now?
--Trakker
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