On Triangulation, Temper Tantrums and Travesties

The one voice of reason and maturity against the Whiny-Ass Titty Baby in the White House is, of course, Digby:

Moreover, there are many people in Obama's coalition who are arguing from a position of core principle and feel that it's important to fight for those principles, particularly in a time of great crisis when they truly, sincerely believe that his compromises are going to make things worse. And it's not like the economic policies that have been tried are all that successful (which may explain the level of anger you see from the president when it's pointed out.)

I get the triangulation thing. The whole Village is now characterizing him as being "the only grown-up" in the room, which I'm sure is exactly what they were going for. And I honestly wouldn't care if he railed at liberals all day long if he had used the power of the presidency and as head of his own party more strategically over the past two years. Huge opportunities were squandered and the advice that he relied on, both on policy and politics, has been inadequate to the task. Now the country is faced with a slavering beast of a right wing which has been revitalized while the rank and file of the Democratic party is confused at best.

So, he can triangulate all he wants, but I'm not sure it will help him as much as they might suppose. The problem is that the policies he's pursuing are likely going to cost him the election because whether he believes in those policies or not doesn't change the fact that he's being set up politically by the right. And he doesn't want to hear about it. No matter how much you like or dislike the man, that's a problem.

Read the whole thing.

Then read this whole piece from Down With Tyranny:

As waggish pundits are already pointing out, if the superrich kick back just a small fraction of their windfall from retention of the Bush tax cuts -- which of course it should have been the politically slam-dunkiest of slam dunks for the administration to beat back, there being no imaginable political cover for hard-balling tools standing firm against their expiration -- they can pour enough cash into the 2012 campaign to swamp not just the president but any pol who either has a "D" next to his/her name or otherwise has shown uppitiness in the face of the power of the oligarchy. In other words, the president has just financed his own demise -- and again, worse, he'll be taking a lot of pols down with him who haven't necessarily earned that fate.

As for what the White House got in exchange, well, there's the extension of unemployment benefits, though with no help for the people who've maxed out at 99 weeks. This means that the Republicans will not have to take any heat as the Christmas Meanies who threw more of the unemployed out of their homes and otherwise made their lives living hell, not to mention having to answer for the considerable hit the economy would have taken from not having that money pumped into it. Republicans claim not to understand the whole concept of economic stimulus, but even they must understand that, in an economy suffering paralysis because of lack of demand, yanking that money out of the system is going to make matters worse.

SNIP

It's not, I think, that President Obama doesn't want to do anything for ordinary Americans, along the lines of the things he seemed to be promising as candidate Obama. The thing to remember is that any hope and change he's prepared to fight for has to be hope and change that doesn't in any important way inconvenience the oligarchs whose servant he is.

Unfortunately for him, he isn't even likely to get whatever reward he thinks they owe him. After all, in the battle now being waged between the right-of-center ideology the president represents and the extreme-right ideology, or the various forms of it, now embodied by the GOP, why should our corporate masters settle for half a loaf?