It was inevitable that Mr. Obama’s lofty pledge to change the ways of Washington would crash into the realities of governing, including lawmakers anxious to protect their constituents and an army of special-interest lobbyists.
Okay, seems reasonable thus far, albeit boilerplate rightwing rhetoric by now.
Then we get this:
“The thing we still don’t know about him is what he is willing to fight for,” said Leonard Burman, an economist at the Urban Institute and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. “The thing I worry about is that he likes giving good speeches, he likes the adulation and he likes to make people happy.”
So far, he said, “It’s hard to think of a place where he’s taken a really hard position.”
Uh, why do we care what this guy has to say? Oh, he hates Obama and fits the narrative we're trying to create. Gotcha. What an absolutely mindless quote.
But wait! They balanced it with a quote from Obama's own Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel!
“We’re not taking on a fight; we’re taking on a multiple-front fight because we’ve taken on a series of entrenched interests across the waterfront — from education to health care, and the defense industry, and the lobbying industry as a whole,” the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said.
Fair and balanced, fair and balanced. Except not:
“If Obama is too timid, if the White House is too cautious,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, “it is going to make him look too opportunistic. He made all these promises during the campaign, he talked so boldly, he stirred all our hopes, and now he is not following through.”
Disregarding the fact that there are few people more blowhardish than presidential historians, I have no idea why we're supposed to care about what Dallek has to say. "If Obama doesn't fix everything in Iraq and bring unemployment down to 3%, the Republicans might paint him as a failed president." See how easy that is?
There is a reason newspapers are dying.
