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Arianna quotes Plouffe, "D.C. is a swamp of conventional wisdom and insiders that can suck
a campaign down, and we needed to think differently." then observes,
"Maybe the answer to the last nine months is to move the White House to Chicago.Indeed, reading the book, I often found myself wondering what Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what the White House is doing and say, "that's what I and my supporters worked so hard for?"
How did the candidate who got into the race because he'd decided that "the core leadership had turned rotten" and that "the people were getting hosed" become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?
How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that "the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result" become the president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying the same old politics, expecting a different result?
How could a president whose North Star as a candidate was that he "would not forget the middle class" choose as his chief economic advisor a man who recently argued against extending unemployment
benefits in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great Depression?
David Plouffe writes in response to Arriana Huffington, an article titled, No Difference Between President Obama and Candidate Obama. He argues that
"During the campaign, the president offered three core promises to the
American people.First, he promised to wake up every day thinking about how to improve the lives of the middle class...
...President Obama's second core campaign promise was to make government more transparent and accountable, to rebuild a sacred trust that had been seriously eroded.
The third core pillar the president offered America was the chance to rebuild and strengthen our relationship with the rest of the world. Doing so would to allow us to solve shared problems and maximize shared opportunities, and to more effectively confront the terrorism and foreign policy challenges faced by the entire world.
Plouffe walks us through how Obama has delivered on these "core promises," in a response to Arianna's review.
The problem is, love doesn't work that way. People fell in love with their expectation of what Obama AND the Democrats who were elected, to a large extent on his coattails, would do.
The DEMOCRATS, who the American people gave extraordinary power, are frittering it away. Even if Plouffe is right technically, that does not matter when it comes to Obama's love affair. He must deliver on what they expect from him-- leadership of the Democratic party-- leadership that gets things done and that stands up to the minority Republicans the election created.
One thing Obama may have campaigned for, which people did not vote for was the passage of bi-partisan bills. They gave Obama such a strong congressional lead that he doesn't need to do bi-partisan.
When you entrust great power AND love to someone, it is their responsibility to use the power and give back at least some of the love-- to show the lover that the love is two way. There's a lot of trust in giving love and even more trust in giving love AND power.
Obama started cutting into that trust by appointing wolves in the henhouse-- Geithner and Summers, to name a few. and Greg Craig, who, as Whitehouse counsel, is advising Obama regarding FISA wiretaps, Guantanamo, Torture, impeachment, investigations of Bush and Cheney, keeping Bush appointed, Rove trained Justice Department attorneys in place... These are the things that are making that love affair with Obama harder and harder to keep alive.
This fall's off season election sends a message to Obama. I'm reading my own tea leave version from here in Bucks County PA, one of the two bell weather counties that usually decide PA elections. Here in Bucks county, where Obama was VERY successful, where Bob Casey obliterated Rick Santorum, Republicans swept the line offices countywide by a 15-20 point margin. The independents gave them the win. The glow is gone for them.
