Well I never thought I would link to a Peggy Noonan article but this one caught my attention. I agree with her that Obama’s belief that moving to the center is a political loser and would be too much like George Bush – to be very revealing about how clueless the man really is. However as a Republican I would be very careful about taking advice from Peggy (1,000 points of light) Noonan. Noonanism is what gave us George H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush (a good man by the way), Bob Dole, and John McCain. What the GOP should do is (IMHO) play rope a dope with Obama, let him punch himself out trying to (unsuccessfully) force a socialist agenda on this country, pointing out where he is going wrong and telling the American public that the days of Republicans going native once they got to Washington D.C. is definitely over.
by Peggy Noonan
There is, I think, an amazing political fact right now that is hiding in plain sight and is rich with implications. It was there in President Obama’s Jan. 25, pre-State of the Union interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who was pressing him about his political predicaments. “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he said. “And I—and I believe that.”
Now this is the sort of thing presidents say, and often believe they believe, but at the end of the day they all want two terms. Except that Mr. Obama shows every sign of meaning it, and if he does, it explains a lot about his recent decisions and actions.
A week after the Sawyer interview, the president had a stunning and revealing exchange with Sen. Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat likely to lose her 2010 re-election campaign. He was meeting with Senate Democrats to urge them to continue with his legislative agenda. Mrs. Lincoln took the opportunity to beseech him to change it. She urged him to distance his administration from “people who want extremes,” and to find “common ground” with Republicans in producing legislation that would give those in business the “certainty” they need to create jobs.
While answering, Mr. Obama raised his voice slightly and quickened his cadence. “If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression . . . the result is going to be the same. I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us in this fix in the first place.” He continued: “If our response ends up being, you know . . . we don’t want to stir things up here,” then “I don’t know why people would say, ‘Boy, we really want to make sure those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.'”
When I saw the videotape later, I wondered how the senator, now down by as much as 23 points in her bid for re-election, felt. Actually I wanted to ask, “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
The Washington Post’s Charles Lane, one of the few journalists to note the exchange, said he found it revealing in two ways: First, the president equates becoming more centrist with becoming more like George W. Bush, and second, he apparently sees movement to the center as a political loser.
[…]
The political class this week blamed it on the Chicago Mafia, the longtime Obama friends and associates who surround him in the Oval Office. But even that doesn’t explain it. What did they do wrong? And why do people think Mr. Obama’s advisers are different from Mr. Obama?
Read the rest: The Off-Center President
Tags: Peggy Noonan
