For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. [...] Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels. It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will. – The President Surrenders, by Paul Krugman
Waking up naked on Monday morning in front of the world is embarrassing. It’s even worse when people looking at you are laughing.
It left Obama loyalists in disarray, grasping for a way to handle the onslaught of outrage. TPM had an interesting way to go at it, providing headlines with question marks, emails from outraged readers, while Obama fell off a pedestal he’d never earned in the first place.
But regurgitating puma-esque headlines? It was not just sad, but disgraceful.
Buyer’s remorse?
Pres. Obama is our president and no matter your political party we all needed him to stand up to the Tea Party extortionists, who in the end proved the only principled people, however crazy their politics, in this mess. That they provided Mitch McConnell with the weapons he needed should go without saying at this point. That they unmasked progressives in Congress as not having half their courage does as well.
What was needed from the President’s loyalists was someone to do political analysis that pointed the blame where it belongs: Pres. Barack Obama, who not only surrendered, but set up a situation where we all get to revisit his cowardice until 2012, while Republicans now know beyond a reason of a doubt he hasn’t the character for his job.
Hillary Clinton is not only irrelevant in this discussion, she doesn’t deserve to be mentioned, because she’s so far out of Obama’s disastrous political “surrender,” to use Krugman’s words, that it’s unfair to drag her back in. Unfortunately, at the height of Pres. Obama’s collapse, some loyalists had nothing else to offer but Clinton redux.
Sen. Mitch McConnell used Barack Obama like a cat plays with an insect. Not quite wiping him out with the first swipe, just when you think it’s safe, your adversary closes in for the final assault. The only thing Obama had left at the end of the weekend was the whine and last gasp of a presidency that will continue, but doesn’t mean anything anymore, because he’s left the United States economically crippled for the foreseeable future.
The New York Times editorial page eviscerated the deal:
There is little to like about the tentative agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House except that it happened at all. The deal would avert a catastrophic government default, immediately and probably through the end of 2012. The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. It will hurt programs for the middle class and poor, and hinder an economic recovery.
Politics isn’t Hollywood, but until people quit playing it as a reality show or a casting call, picking their favorite celebrity and thinking personality is the answer, relying on celebrity talk show hosts who pronounce politicians as “The One,” we’ll get bad endings and short stories about people who leave carnage in their wake, without ever caring what happens when they’re gone.
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