So the President wants to rehire old hands and pretend he's back on the campaign trail.
Now he sees the potential danger for Democrats in this year's election after too much hay was made of the Massachusetts senate race.
Now he sees (or claims to) that people "are angry" and has whipped out his populist character to tell us he feels our pain.
Good luck with all that, Mr. President.
It's too bad he didn't have the vision and understanding to do the same thing back in the summer of 2009, when he decided to go on vacation and leave the health care reform to Congressional Democrats, who fucked it up right on schedule. Instead of building support, he let the Republicans do what they do best: frame the debate, sow fear and lie their asses off to any and everyone. So by the start of the fall, we had "death panels" and Teabagger assholes all over the news. And then the President returns and seems confused (I think that was the emotion but it's hard to tell with him) about people's "anger" and starts backing off certain parts of health care reform, ready to chop off its remaining testicle.
And the longer he and Congress dithered, the less support they could claim from the public because the Republican noise machine (never vanquished, merely dormat) had succeeded in removing the true outrage that at a centerfold-posing new senator from Massachusetts could derail all of the hand-wringing and defanging of health care to the stupid idea that "well, maybe we really need to wait on reform after all." It's amazing to see the Democrats and their obsession with their now useless supermajority fixated on 60 votes rather than showing that the Rethugs are selfish assholes who want people to stay off health care rolls. Instead, they wasted the entire summer and fall making lousy deals with mindnumbingly short-sighted Dems and allowed themselves to fall right into a Republican trap.
What's that description of the Democratic Party? Always ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
So now, the President wants to "reboot" his focus and hire a bunch of operatives from his campaign to put the fire into his agenda. No, Mr. President, you need to come back to work, you need to start fighting and you need to stop making populist speeches and give the Democrats marching orders. Your operatives were more focused on defeating Hillary than they were fighting Republicans: what new idea are they going to bring to the table that is suddenly going to outdo what the minority Republicans managed to accomplish in a matter of months?
Nothing, I say, but I'll wait and see.
