How did the Chosen One lose his magic?
The leftward edge of the left says he did it by being too accommodating, by trying for a bipartisanship that doesn't exist. The rightward edge of the right says he did it by revealing his essentially socialistic agenda. The center has said, in polls and at the polls, that it didn't like his administration's first-year obsession with a health-care bill that was huge, costly and impenetrably complicated, and would be run by those people who gave you the DMV and the post office.
The political class this week blamed it on the Chicago Mafia, the longtime Obama friends and associates who surround him in the Oval Office. But even that doesn't explain it. What did they do wrong? And why do people think Mr. Obama's advisers are different from Mr. Obama?
Washington's pundits have begun announcing that the White House is better at campaigning than at governing, but that was obvious last summer. The president and his advisers understand one thing really well, and that is Democratic primaries and Democratic politics. This is the area in which they made their careers. It's how they defeated Hillary Clinton—by knowing how Democrats think. In the 2008 general election, appealing for the first time to all of America and not only to Democrats, they had one great gift on their side, the man who both made Mr. Obama and did in John McCain, and that was George W. Bush.
Technorati tags:
politics 
Democrats 
health 
universal health care 
Barack Obama 
Obama
No comments:
Post a Comment