Chauncey Gardner, really?
The President has been a source of ongoing frustration: his failure to leverage a powerful hand in 2009-2010, deliver toothy health care legislation and financial reform bills and last December his capitulation to the GOP in the spirit of compromise the extension of the Bush tax cuts.
Sometimes foresight can be 20/20. Damn straight I'm blowing my horn when I refer you back to a December 6th, 2010 blog post on HuffPo when I raised the spectre of the debt ceiling looming as the next flash point and chastised the President for not including a hike in the ceiling as part of his McConnell compromise. The next day Marc Ambinder of the National Journal did likewise in a press conference in which the President was befuddled by his question. Such alarms seven months ago proved accurate and the result has been yet another compromise with a compromise that had been compromised seeking compromise.
The President has been consistent in setting deadlines and conditions to govern Congressional action, only to abdicate thereafter. He's a study in crying wolf. In fact he reminds me of British PM Neville Chamberlain's assurance to his countrymen after the Munich Conference in 1938 that he had secured"...bringing peace with honour...a peace for our time. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."
I'll support the President's re-election bid. I'll vote for him and urger others to do likewise. At the same time I am questioning what was once unthinkable and still considered heresy amongst his ardent supporters: is Mr. Obama hopelessly naive or is he just not that smart?