What Digby said Goldilocks Triangulation
There’s a ton of discussion this morning about this article in which unnamed White House functionaries run to Politico to complain that nobody understands them. I think it pretty much speaks for itself, but there are some points worth discussing.
First of all, the central premise seems to be that liberals should be happy that Obama has “gotten something done” without regard to what that “something” is. But the fact is that professional politicians always rattle off a legislative laundry list while activists care about process, politics and policy — and average voters only care about the results. (The press cares about “the score”, however they decide to define it that day.) A successful president is expected to know how to manage all of that — and browbeating his voters is rarely a winning strategy.
Therefore, his political advisers should know that when the country is still reeling from unemployment and foreclosures after nearly two years, the passage of an inadequate stimulus bill, which unrealistic benchmarks and a giddy victory party ensured would be the only chance they got, the only people who will consider that a “success” would be beltway insiders. They should have realized that a health care bill that nobody in their right minds would have designed from scratch, the worst aspects of which liberals will be asked to defend for years to come, would be met with dampened enthusiasm by those who watched the process devolve from a sense of progressive purpose to an exhausting farce. They are expected to be able to predict that financial reform without accountability for what’s gone before, combined with the administration’s unwillingness to confront the civil liberties abuse of the last administration — indeed expanding on them in some cases — would show a lack of fundamental concern for justice among those who care about such things.
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Still, running to Politico to complain about the immature liberals would seem to be even more counterproductive than usual. Indeed, it’s so counterproductive that I have to assume this is a conscious triangulation tactic. After all, if what you are upset about is liberals failing to be properly supportive, it hardly seems wise to take to the Drudge Daily to complain about them, does it? But then even these anonymous whiners can’t be so stupid as to think browbeating a bunch of liberal bloggers has any meaning among anyone but the Village elite so that’s obviously what this is about — creating a Goldilocks meme among the media that says because Obama is criticized by both the immature bloggers and the radical tea party, he must be juuust riiiight. That won’t do the Democrats any good in the short run, but it sounds like a 2012 strategy in the making.
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