Terrific article in the left-leaning New Republic by a devout Obama supporter“John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”
It is too long to summarize, but terrific analysis and I’ll just give you the final two paragraphs as a teaser:
The last two Democratic presidents faced similar crises. After the Democrats got drubbed in the 1978 midterms, Jimmy Carter took exactly the wrong course. He replaced mediocre people with even more mediocre people. He allowed intramural squabbles to surface. He lost his focus and ended up blaming the American people for his political problems. Clinton, who had governed his first year as a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law graduate, rediscovered after November 1994 that he had been a successful governor of Arkansas. He governed for the remainder of his six years as the president of middle America, even resisting a furious attempt by Republicans to impeach him.
I am not sure how Obama can surmount this crisis. Obama does not seem, like Ronald Reagan or Clinton, to be a man of many faces. Even back in Chicago in the 1990s, it was clear that the man who had given up community organizing to become a lawyer and politician was more comfortable in Hyde Park than in Southeast or Northwest Chicago. Obama can try to make himself into a friend of Joe Sixpack and the enemy of Wall Street–he’s certainly trying to do so with his proposal to tax the big banks to pay for their bailout–but it’s not going to come naturally. Still, Obama has surprised his critics before, and perhaps (one hopes!) he will do so again.”
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/he-doesnt-feel-your-pain?page=0,2
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