“I don’t honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn’t figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he’s not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he’s going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they’re seeing right now is ‘liberalism,’ and they don’t like what they see. I don’t, either. What’s they’re seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That’s a recipe for going nowhere fast — but getting there by November.“
I already said my piece about this last week, and was going to let it drop for now. But this long essay by Drew Westen on the problems with Obama’s leadership so far is right on the nose and well worth-reading. “[W]hat Democrats just can’t seem to understand is that the politics of the lowest common denominator is always a losing politics. It sends a meta-message that you’re weak — nothing more, nothing less — and that’s the cross the Democrats have had to bear since they ‘lost China’ 60 years ago. And in fact, it is weak.“
