For some reason I read the following E.J. Dionne column with the mistaken belief that it had been authored by George Will. It seemed like Will was making an inordinate amount of sense. Eventually I realized that it violated a basic law of the universe for George Will to make that much sense and that it must have been authored by someone else.
But everything is relative. It’s not a very enlightening piece by Dionne’s standards. Take this:
What, then, can Obama and his discouraged allies do to regain the initiative?
For starters, they must restore a functional relationship between the White House and its sometimes-friends, sometimes-critics on the left. Too often, the White House has been caught whining about its progressive critics. The president’s aides act as if whatever Obama happens to decide is the only sensible and realistic thing to do. For the left to ask Obama to be bolder in testing the limits of the possible means it is doing its job of pushing the president to do more, and to do it faster. Conservatives have mastered this approach. Why can’t liberals do the same?
But too often, progressives have spent more time complaining about what wasn’t done than in finding ways to build on what has actually been achieved. It took decades to complete the modern Social Security system, and years to move from tepid to robust civil rights laws and from modest to comprehensive environmental regulation. Impatience is indispensable to getting reform started; patience is essential to seeing its promise fulfilled.
Considering that this bit is supposed to be about regaining the initiative, it’s pretty weak to lecture the White House about its tendency to defend itself and “the left” about never being satisfied. Those things aren’t going to change. We can be critical of that reality, but we ought not offer it up as something to fix so that we can get our mojo back.
There are two things that will help us get our mojo back: Speaker Boehner and Obama’s reelection campaign. That’s all we need. An improving economy would be nice, but realistically we are going to be fighting over who is to blame for high unemployment and who has a better plan to get something through Congress that will create jobs.
