Greg Sargent takes a look at the latest CBS poll: “Now, 40 percent of Americans polled approve of President Obama’s handling of the economy; 54 percent disapprove. That’s down from 45 percent approval last month. Seventy-one percent of those polled say that their local job market is bad and 70 percent say it’s going to stay the same or get worse.” Sargent then poses a smart query to his fellow Democrats:
At what point does the current Dem message that things are improving become counterproductive happy talk? After all, in the absence of more action, it risks making Dems look out of touch with the reality on the ground and makes it tougher for Obama to point to how awful things are to spur Congress to act.
Well, this has been Obama’s and the Democrats’ problem for some time. They say the stimulus plan is working; voters don’t believe them. They say ObamaCare is going to shrink the deficit; the voters don’t believe them. They say their focus is on jobs; the voters don’t believe them. It is not just that Democrats “look” out of touch — they are! They’ve pursued an agenda the public doesn’t want and expected voters to learn to love their handiwork.
As the Democrats (as well as their media supporters) come to grips with the impending wave election, one likely to sweep many from office, they may finally get reacquainted with reality. Elections have a way of doing that.
And there was this today.
The Wittgenstein quote is revealing. Sullivan is way too reckless to be silenced. Prediction: retirement from the Atlantic and a new blog on some other platform, this one even more sexually centered.
Obama gets personal .. don’t let it get ugly.
Everybody take a deep breath while Obama destroys himself.
Wow. I saw that headline on Drudge, too. That’s ugly.
That’s only the half of it. The rest of Obama’s line: “you can wrap a dead fish in paper and call it change, but it’s still going to stink”.
The Politico comments seem to be running about 10:1 that this was a despicable slam against Palin and women.
That’s a careless, unforced error and reminiscent of the nastiness that came out of the mouth of Ann Richards.Good wit needs to be subtle, and Obama is getting very tetchy.
here comes the sexism card.
Going back to Sullivan for a second, I just wanted to ask, was there any precise moment or occasion when he went over to the dark side, or has this just been a gradual process?
So Barry is also taunting her with a “stinking fish” metaphor? Gee, none of us have a clue what that could mean, do we??? NOW would be all over that comment like a community organizer on a sit in.
He’s taking the Olbermann/Huffington advice. Get ANGRY Barack. Call them pigs. Better yet, call them pigs and monkeys! Or neocons, which we all understand to be another euphamism for the same thing. Say, they hang around with that Lieberman fellow, don’t they? They probably have dual loyalties.
Oh, and btw to On The Right #8, it was gradual but the tipping point was Abu Ghraib. I was able to read Andrew for another 6 months after that, but eventually I had to give up. It is sad. He was once a very capable thinker. His articles in TNR changed my mind on gay marriage.
#8 – The precise moment he turned on Bush was January 2004, just after he endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment. He was one of the absolute biggest Bush boosters prior to that. In all honesty, though, I think he has AIDS dementia. He hasn’t been lucid in about four years.
“Going back to Sullivan for a second, I just wanted to ask, was there any precise moment or occasion when he went over to the dark side, or has this just been a gradual process?”
I believe it was when George W. Bush came out in favor of a constitutional amendment to protect male-female marriage.
I could be wrong about this. But if my memory serves me correctly it was about that time that Sullivan began distancing himself from his support of the Iraq war.
I’ve always been convinced that it wasn’t simply Bush’s opposition to gay marriage. There had to be a boyfriend issue where the boyfriend was in essence relentlessly beating him over the head as a traitor to gays everywhere. Had there been no boyfriend issue, he probably could have dealt with Bush, etc., much better.
As others have said, it is extremely sad what has happened to him.
Sully says he’s merely spending quality time “with my husband.”
I’m gay and he practically made me against gay marriage: I got so tired of him bleating about it constantly. If I had kept reading him I probably would have joined Sarah’s Church of God.
Well thanks to all who responded to my question. Like some of you, I used to read the Daily Dish very frequently, and enjoyed his writing. If Abu Ghraib really was instrumental in re-forming Sullivan’s worldview, that would be ironic to me, since I actually felt that was an issue which conservatives greatly underestimated, in terms of the effect it would have on America’s image as a benevolent power. So I think Sullivan was correct to specially emphasize that point.