Once Again Obama is Playing on the Wrong End of the Field

Reading various blogs and op-ed pieces, it seems that I am hardly the only one disgusted with weak kneed, Jell-O spine Barack Obama. While Mitt Romney is being pummeled with questions of whether he truly believes in anything, the same could well be said of Obama. Indeed, some are making the argument that Obama needs to be challenged in a primary fight for the Democratic Party nomination. Obama's approach time and time again seems to be to give up 50% of the farm before he even begins to confront the extremists of the GOP who care nothing for average citizens and want to restore the economic brutality of the Gilded Age of the robber barons. It drives me crazy and I worry what he will give away of Medicare and other social safety net issues! Ruth Marcus has a piece in the Washington Post that lays into Obama for precisely this reason. Here are some highlights:
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I’m no sports nut but I’ve spent enough time at kids’ soccer games to understand that it’s impossible to score if you’re playing on the wrong side of the field. Which is why I have found the White House strategy for dealing with Republicans on the deficit so befuddling.
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The fight over spending this fiscal year is a case in point. The prospect of a Republican takeover of the House was evident well before the election. The inevitable result was going to be more draconian cuts than would have been required if the spending bills were passed beforehand.
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In the aftermath of the Democrats’ losses, the entire debate played out in terms they were destined to lose. If the argument is framed solely in terms of budget cuts, Republicans always win: They are willing to out-cut Democrats. That inescapable tilt was exacerbated by the virtual absence of a White House message about the impact of a shutdown or the cuts themselves.
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In the final hours, Democrats rallied their troops with complaints about a Republican “war on women” — and held fast against eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood. But how many people knew that the House-passed budget would have eliminated all federal money for family planning? Hardly anyone — because the White House and Democrats weren’t telling them.
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A second, maddening example of the White House allowing the other side to frame the debate involves the longer-term fiscal picture. The president convened a commission on the topic and then abandoned it. First, he did not lift a finger to help his co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, assemble the 14 votes necessary to get the commission’s plan a congressional vote. Then, when the plan was released, the president pointedly declined to express a view.
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If the White House had weighed in on Simpson-Bowles before Ryan released his plan, it could have staked out an argument that the framework — a combination of spending cuts and tax increases — was correct but that some specifics (the precise mix of the two, the details of the Social Security fix) went too far in the conservative direction. Now the “reasonable” compromise would be between Simpson-Bowles on the leftward side and Ryan on the right.
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It [the White House]hurriedly arranged for a speech and slapped together what seems to be shaping up less as an Obama plan than as an endorsement of the Gang of Six approach. I’m all for the president weighing in — in fact, I’ve been recommending it for months. But I question the haste and timing: If the Gang of Six looks like the Democratic alternative to Ryan, its Republican members will be out on a limb. Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, who convened the gang along with Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, said the White House “threw us a little bit of a curveball” with its surprise Sunday announcement. And if the White House was going to support the Simpson-Bowles framework all along, why not do it earlier and take advantage of the momentum?
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The country desperately needs a leader, but in Obama we only have a follower. The lost opportunities resulting from his refusal to be a leader are staggering.

Democrats Are Jarred by Drop In Fundraising

A Washington Post story that I bookmarked on Friday and did not get back until today - I had to take the day off due to the latest developments in the post divorce wars and my need to evaluate what to do to end the nightmare - looks at the Democrats' reaction to the drop in fundraising that they have experienced. While the Washington Post story tries to blame the drop on big business, I suspect that the real cause is the disgust of Democrats who elected Obama president and gave the Democrats control of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives only to see Obama and Congressional Democrats utterly squander the mandate that they were given to effect change. Instead, we have seen the lunatic rump of the ever increasingly irrelevant GOP calling all the shots. Here are some story highlights:

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Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party's harsh rhetoric about big business.

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The trend is a marked reversal from recent history, in which Democrats have erased the GOP's long-standing fundraising advantage. In the first six months of 2009, Democratic campaign committees' receipts have dropped compared with the same period two years earlier.

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As the battle over President Obama's effort to overhaul the health-care system reached a fever pitch this summer, the three national Republican committees combined to bring in $1.7 million more than their Democratic counterparts in August. The pair of Democratic committees tasked with raising money for House and Senate candidates -- and doing so at a time when the party holds its strongest position on Capitol Hill in a generation -- have watched their receipts plummet by a combined 20 percent with little more than a year to go before the November 2010 midterm elections.

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Democrats said a struggling economy is only partly to blame for the poor fundraising performance and acknowledged a more perilous problem: satisfaction among activists that the party now holds the White House, 60 votes in the Senate and 60 percent of the House.

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House Democrats have seen donations to the DCCC drop 16 percent, with individual contributions more than 25 percent off their 2007 pace. But party leaders saw a 50 percent increase in small-dollar donations in August, after what they hope was a wake-up call to liberals who watched endless cable news footage of conservative protesters dominating town hall meetings. "Our supporters around the country realized they have a fight on their hands," Van Hollen said. "People are rallying."

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The bottom line is that people are asking why support the Democrats and Obama when given a mandate they lack the courage and balls to do what they were elected to do. Stated differently, why throw good money after bad given the Democrats failure to deliver.