The leading liberal voices of the New York Times editorial pages all criticized—and, in some cases, clobbered—President Obama on Sunday for his handling of the economy and national security.
It's not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it's perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd—and in the paper's lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail.
The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.
Unlike with President Bush, the Obama administration is less apt to dismiss such commentary, at least publicly, as so much carping from an out-of-touch peanut gallery. These are voices that have been sympathetic, and at times gushing toward Obama, during the campaign and in his administration’s early days.
The president and his top aides read the Times closely and react quickly to its reporting and commentary. Tom Daschle, for example, withdrew from consideration as Health and Human Services Secretary amid back tax issues on the same day that the paper ran a tough front-page piece and editorial on what keeping Daschle would mean to the Obama brand.
So it likely caused some consternation this morning at the White House and at Camp David, where the president is staying this weekend, to pick up the Times and find:
—Frank Rich, who made a cottage industry of Bush-bashing, writing that until Obama “addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.”
Recalling the Daschle episode and the public’s response to the image of a wealthy former senator not paying taxes on a limousine, Rich said that judging from their response to the AIG case “the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.”
Larry Summers, perhaps the president’s most high-profile economic adviser, came in for the worst of it.
“Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy," Rich wrote.
—Thomas Friedman, the paper’s highly-read foreign affairs columnist, turning his focus home to find the nation lacking “inspirational leadership.”
Friedman’s indictment was not limited to Obama, but he captured some of the concern about the president’s communications skills by writing that the president “missed a huge teaching opportunity with A.I.G.”
Instead of letting Congress react in its usual knee-jerk fashion to overcompensate for what it believes the public wants—what Friedman called letting them “run riot”—the president should have stepped up. - Politico.com Story
This sounds vaguely familiar. Complaints abound about the lack of leadership and the failures of the President. The only difference is that this is coming from the Liberal Media. The same Liberal Media who helped drive Obama to the White House.
This is an ever growing echo from across the USA. Obama was a smooth talker who said what you wanted to hear. The problem was the American people didn't really listen to what he was saying. The acts of President Obama were well predicted prior to his taking office, but were brushed away by a majority of the Media and by a vast Majority of Americans.
Now we live with what the Majority voted for. Is this what we expected? Are we getting what we deserved? I didn't vote for Obama, so I really can't answer either of those questions without some bias attached.
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