Chalk It Up

to inexperience or the desire to pander to corporate interests in order to explain why the president has squandered vast amounts of political capital this summer.

The GOP is sure to bounce back and make this country even worse off. I can't believe the whole damned thing.

Obama needs to focus on job creation and the economy and forget health care for the time being. It just pales in importance when millions can't find work and those who do have jobs are scared to death they, too, will be poor.

That he let the hard-core base of a leaderless minority party drive the debate only diminished his stature. That’s why his poll numbers on “leadership” declined. The right-wing fringe has become so deranged that it will yank its kids out of school to protest the president and risk yanking more Americans off assembly lines by boycotting General Motors to protest the administration’s Detroit bailout. Even Laura Bush and Newt Gingrich stepped in last week to defend Obama’s classroom homily from the fusillades by some of their own party’s most prominent ideologues. The White House should have landed a punch before they did.

Obama would have looked stronger if he’d stood up more proactively to the screamers along the way, or at least to the ones not packing guns. As the Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith has reminded us, it didn’t harm the New Deal for F.D.R. to tell a national radio audience on election eve 1936 that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies. Indeed Obama instantly gained a foot or two in height Wednesday night once that South Carolina clown hollered “You lie!” (One wonders what this congressman calls the Republican governor of his own state, Mark Sanford.) As the political analyst Charlie Cook has pointed out, Obama’s leadership poll numbers have also suffered from his repeated deference to Congress. Waiting for the pettifogging small-state potentates of both parties in the Senate’s Gang of Six is as farcical as waiting for Godot.

But Obama was always campaigning about "reaching across the aisle" with people who have NO intention of compromising their twisted political beliefs. He didn't and doesn't understand the opposition AT ALL. But then again columnists like Frank Rich were huge cheerleaders for Obama last year and should have known he was one of these "conciliators," exactly what we DON'T need running the country.

But of course Obama is in the White House, and he better be realizing what the hell is at stake for him, the party, and the country.