How Obama Will Outsmart His Critics

23 January 2012 |permalink | email article

ANDREW SULLIVAN, in a widely read and long discussed article in The Daily Beast on Jan. 15, wrote that President Obama’s long game may just end up outsmarting all his critics. The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he’s a wimp. You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual. A president, in the final year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base.

In a caveat, Sullivan writes that he has been an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending and torture.  I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already. There have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore war crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction.

But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains a simple fact that Obama delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

The right’s core case is that Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accused the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a socialist welfare state, not believing in opportunity or free enterprise. In short, Romney says Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America. With his defeat of Romney Newt Gingrich is already smearing Obama, but Sullivan will outsmart him, too.

Quotable

President Obama, in a video preview e-mailed to millions of supporters Saturday, promised a populist “blueprint for an American economy that’s built to last,” with the government assisting the private sector and enshrinement’s assistance and individuals to ensure “in America where everybody gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everybody plays by the same set of rules.”

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