Thursday, April 30, 2009

100 Days, 100 Nights.

A[nother] Look Back.


"Y'al know what this is!"

Words.

"In his 100th-day news conference, Obama had a bit of my-burden-is-great tone, while going out of his way to reject cartoon liberalism. “I don’t want to run auto companies,” he said. “I don’t want to run banks. I’ve got two wars to run already.”

He seemed genuinely humbled by his meetings with average servicemen and servicewomen, and empathetic to the moral qualms presented to any woman considering an abortion.

What we are seeing is a president, though arguably more liberal than anyone since Lyndon Johnson, who is hard to dismiss in the shorthand of our politics – the caricature branding of left or right.

Karl Rove insists that Obama is a more polarizing president than George W. Bush, pointing to yawning approval gap between Democrats and Republicans. Nobody knows how to wield a wedge like Rove, but he’s wrong on this one.

The gap is there because the Republican Party has shrunk to a raisin of its former self, baking in the sun of the old Confederacy. A mere 21 percent of people called themselves Republicans in a Washington Post poll. The vast majority of the country – Democrats and independents – are with Obama, given his high marks by both groups...

...No doubt, 38 percent of Americans are still conservative, as they’ve been for the last 20 years. But a good portion of them are no longer Republican.

They are parked, for now, in a lane of open-mindedness, along with the 75 percent of Americans who see Obama as a “strong leader.” If their president also happens to be a liberal, they don’t care – so long as he succeeds."

  • THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Off-Brand Presidency
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