Frank Rich's column in today's NY Times is an absolute must-read, IMHO. As Rich points out, it's time for the President to start naming names and reminding us of why we voted for him in 2008.
Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back
By FRANK RICH
NY Times
September 12, 2010
NO, he can't. President Obama can't reverse the unemployment numbers by Election Day. He can't get even a modest new stimulus bill past the Party of No, and even if he could, there would be few jobs to show for it until (maybe) 2011. Nor can he rewrite the history of his administration. Its signal accomplishments to date are an initial stimulus package that was overrun by the calamity at hand and a marathon health care battle as yet better known for its unseemly orgy of backroom wrangling than its concrete results. While that brawl raged, the White House seemed indifferent to the mounting number of Americans being tossed onto the Great Recession scrapheap.
And so the odds that Obama's party will survive the midterms seem less than Indiana Jones's in the Temple of Doom -- as we are reminded hourly by the Beltway herd flogging the latest polls. The Democrats are facing a "historic" rout, an earthquake, a tidal wave -- well, you know the drill. End of story.
Unless it's not...
Rich then continues on to discuss the enthusiasm gap, and reiterates the issue at hand: the perception in middle America that the President has lost touch with Main Street.
That a former community organizer and insurgent presidential candidate from a rocky middle-class background could be branded an out-of-touch elitist is not entirely the fault of his critics. Obama has perhaps never recovered from handing his administration's plum economic jobs to Robert Rubin protégés with dirty hands from the bubble -- Lawrence Summers, a deregulation advocate from the Clinton administration, and Timothy Geithner, an indulgent regulator at the New York Fed. Their presence has helped Obama's more unscrupulous adversaries get away with the lie that his White House, not President Bush's, created TARP...
I could continue detailing what Rich tells us in his column in today's NYT, but why ruin his great writing with a second-rate rendition?
Check it out! The link's near the top.