Is Obama winning?

[jaysunb]

Robert Shrum
Is Obama winning?

The president's long-game strategy has confounded a town with a famously short attention span. With Obama doubling down on health reform, our columnist doubles down on Obama.
posted on March 11, 2010, at 5:00 PM

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.

This remarkable rise anticipates as many as hundreds of thousands of jobs, which forecasters are now predicting not for next year but for this month. During the interregnum between passage of the stimulus bill last year and its impact this year, the president was urged to focus solely on "jobs, jobs, jobs"—as though the mantra itself would create them. But his policies had already averted the depression and begun to reverse the decline. More stimulus would help, and it will come—not in a largely symbolic jobs bill but in the Keynesian deficits of Obama’s new budget.

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.

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

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

[NJmaverick]

1. I think we will have a better answer in the next week or two

Reforming the health care system will be a huge victory if it passes.

[jaysunb]

2. It will pass

and many will have amnesia...

[NJmaverick]

4. I hope you're right. This is such a great thing for a nation

I don't want to count the chickens before they hatch.

[Cha]

5. "Amnesia" will always

be there.. thanks to our corporatemedia unless something is bad for the Dems and then they're on the spot to remind their viewing audience.

I like to think it's part of our job to remind whomever we can of the history of what actually went down.

:hi: Jay

[jaxx]

3. Jeez I wish he had spelled Carl Sandburg correctly.

:-(