Who’s He Listening To?

by digby

Greg Sargent over at The Plum line, asks an important question:

…[P]ublications, Newsweek in particular, are asserting that Obama failed because he was too “bipartisan” at the outset, which is not a take you hear often from the Beltway media. Also, the question I’m asking is, Did Obama’s initial failure to draw a sharper contrast with the opposition happen in spite of the D.C. veterans he’s surrounded with who are supposed experts at the Washington power game, or because of them?

Setting aside Michael Hirsh, who both dday and I excerpted, (and whose columns I searched for previous paeans to bipartisanship and didn’t find any) none of the cable gasbags or the village scribblers have any standing to be questioning Obama’s bipartisan strategy. They are the ones who define bipartisan as catering to Republicans. They’ve been doing it for years.

I can prove this by the fact that when George W. Bush seized office under dubious circumstances and without any kind of a popular mandate, they insisted that Democrats cater to his wishes on massive tax cuts telling partisans who disagreed with his agenda to just “get over it.” In 2004 (when George W. Bush won with six million fewer votes than Obama) they giggled over Grover Norquist’s assertion that the Democrats were now neutered farm animals who would be happier now that they’d been tamed.

So, as much as I have railed that post-partisanship is a pipe dream and that while Obama was talented he was not actually capable of retiring human nature, I find the media’s pooh-poohing to be a bit much. They have been orgasmic at the prospect that Obama wouldn’t let the dirty hippies take over and are only disappointed now that the Democrats are getting anything at all. It’s simply not the way things are supposed to work. Their complaints about Obama being too bipartisan, you see, are actually that he failed to capitulate enough to the Republicans, not that he capitulated too much.

As to Greg’s question as to whether or not Obama listened to the veterans, Jane Hamsher has some intriguing insights into the legislative sausage making today. If what she says is true, it means that Rahm was being cleverly Machiavelian and is now trying to deflect the blame for his own bad call.

President Obama has a huge crisis, a Democratic congress, a mandate and the support of a wide swathe of the people. He didn’t need Rahm to pit the Blue Dogs against the Democrats against the Republicans in some sort of abstract kabuki pageant just because he could. There may be a time and a place where such a thing might make sense. But in the first two weeks of the presidency it made things more complicated than was necessary, particularly considering the fact that people have been so indoctrinated in conservative dogma, that even if they want “change” they don’t know what that entails. Once the devil got into the details, it always required Obama to sell it himself with a deft and certain media plan. If Rahm is playing some sort of inside game to make the liberals be the goats and have Obama be the hero in sympathy with the Blue Dogs, it’s the wrong move. The Republicans are already casting the president as weak and this just makes him look weaker.

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