"Is Obama winning"?

[impik]

Robert Shrum doubles down on Obama:

As the dreary winter winds down, the political weather is also changing. On the economy, the green shoots of recovery, seeded more than a year ago, may now have their spring. On health care, the Obama renaissance is real—a historic achievement is within reach. And as these events unfold, the media, in an act of swift revisionism, may conclude that the White House, rather than falling victim to an internal conflict between idealism and pragmatism, has instead married them to advance its ambitious agenda...

First, the economy:

...Obama refused to play to a public gallery angry at the bailouts that have proved indispensable to saving the financial sector. And he has defied the ill-informed clichés and partisan complaints about deficits. The fiscal outcry will fade as the economy strengthens, and a vindicated president will take the credit—and begin to close the budget gap...


Second, health reform.

Massachusetts supposedly sounded the death knell for a bill devoid of death panels. Washington wisdom, appearing triumphant, congratulated itself for having predicted that the smears would win in the end. But the president has a longer attention span than the cable networks. Instead, he pushed ahead, and harder, echoing the compelling clarity of his campaign voice in 2008...

...Obama’s strategy, partly shaped by events, also reflects the combination of qualities that brought him to the Oval Office—and makes it more than likely that he will reach the goal that has eluded the nation since Theodore Roosevelt first proposed national health care in 1912. Obama has been "a steel fist in a velvet glove"—Carl Standburg’s description of Lincoln. The president who doesn’t panic, didn’t...


Third, the White House intrigues


...But what’s in today’s papers is not the president’s focus. Obama takes the long view and plays a long game—just as he and Axelrod did in the campaign. Against the odds, the president and his "idealist" may actually break the chokehold of the conventional and petty Washington doctrine that less is more and political cowardice is the better part of wisdom. And if this president succeeds on health reform as well as on the economy, he will be empowered to advance the rest of an agenda that ranges from financial reform to the prodigious task of tackling climate change (even in an atmosphere of denial). He will begin to heal the shattered faith in government, opening the way to a new progressive era...

....By 2012, with a full-blown recovery and wide ranging change achieved, it may well be morning in Obama’s America. And the Republicans, desperate to explain away prosperity, or still fulminating against socialism, will once again descend ungently into that good night.



Read it all:

http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/200716/Is_Obama_winning

[trumad]

1. One can only hope.

[FredStembottom]

2. As Pee Wee would say: "I love that story".

... and I certainly hope repeated caving-in to Corporate demands and seeing One's base as "f**kin' retarded" "open(s) the way to a new progressive era"...

I really do.

But down here in blue-collar world, too many friends and relatives are slipping into grinding poverty and increasingly frightening illness and degradation.

I don't know what kind of America Shrum lives in that he can sit back and enjoy the "football" of politics but where I live, we fall away one at a time.

Still... :beer: here's to that New Era.

[Clio the Leo]

3. "the President who doesn't panic....."

.... and THAT was the change *I* voted for!

[applegrove]

4. And with the democrats lookin good it may make the odd repuke break ranks

and vote with the democrats on a jobs bill or financial regulations reforms.

[girl gone mad]

5. This is a very odd piece of writing..

so far and away from anything approaching reality I wouldn't even know where to begin.