As I've mentioned numerous times, the concerns of the "left of the left"
have now gone mainstream. Team Obama can no longer claim that only "fringe" Democrats are concerned about the president's leadership, and worse, his character. We should not be seeing stories, only eight months into Obama's presidency, questioning whether he's "soft." The man won by a hearty margin, he was soaring in the polls just months ago, and now he's down to 50% and dropping.
At some point, we need to stop blaming Rahm and Messina for this growing mess, and put the responsibility with the man who has the power to turn things around, but doesn't even seem to recognize that there's a problem. From Bob Herbert:
It’s still early, but people are starting to lose faith in the president. I hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle. Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in.
More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.
People want more from Mr. Obama. They want him to be their champion. But they don’t feel that he is speaking to them in a language that they understand. He is seen as more comfortable speaking the Wall Street lingo. People don’t feel that the voices of anxiety are being heard.
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