Seeing and Denying the Light

It's an interesting thing: because of the earth's rotation, the sun comes up on the Eastern Seaboard before it does in the Midwest. Yet only now are some denizens of the East starting to see the light:

With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters. This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democratic business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle.

Well, Mark Halperin is a little late to the party, but glad that he's figured all that out. Or has he?

Most of Obama's private (and sometimes public) rebuttals to the voices slamming him on all sides are justified or spot on. He did inherit a lot of problems from the Bush Administration. He did act quickly in the initial weeks of his Administration to stave off a worldwide depression. His efforts at job creation have been obstructed by Republicans (even the proposals based on policies supported by the GOP in the past). His opponents haven't put forth specifics of their own, nor offered genuine compromise, while the media have allowed the right's activists and gabbers to run wild with criticism without furnishing legitimate alternative solutions.

Most of this litany is crap, of course. Republicans haven't been a position to obstruct anything -- they have been unified in opposition, but the House and Senate have strong enough majorities that they have been able to bull through plenty of things, at least until the congressional Democrats who are going to face the voters in this cycle realized that many of their consituents wanted no part of what they were offering. Halperin also knows that there are a number of GOP alternatives available, some quite specific. I'd also ask what specific compromises he'd suggest the GOP make. Specificity cuts both ways, no? And don't you wonder when the media were given the power to decide whether or not "the right's activists and gabbers" were allowed to run wild with criticism? It's hard out here for a gatekeeper, I guess.

So how do you square Halperin's complaints with these observations, also from the same piece?

On Friday, after the release of the latest bleak unemployment data — the last major jobs figures before the midterms — Obama said, "Putting the American people back to work, expanding opportunity, rebuilding the economic security of the middle class is the moral and national challenge of our time." But elites feel the President has failed to meet that challenge and are convinced he will be unable to do so in the remainder of his term. Moreover, there is a growing perception that Obama's decisions are causing harm — that businesses are being hurt by the Administration's legislation and that economic recovery is stalling because of the uncertainty surrounding energy policy, health care, deficits, housing, immigration and spending.

Guess what, Mr. Halperin -- you said the secret word. It's uncertainty. No one can plan for the future if there's a sense that what you are working on might get confiscated by the state. I don't know whether my taxes are going up next year or not, although they will unless the current Congress takes action, because I do make enough money to pay income taxes. My employer, a privately held company, faces uncertainty on any number of fronts for the same reason. And there's a reason for why we are uncertain. Too bad Mr. Halperin doesn't quite want to see it.