Think Progress's Matthew Yglesias (2/22/10) points to a rather bizarre Economist editorial (2/18/10) blaming President Barack Obama's problems on his failure to move to the right:

It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr. Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favors. If, instead of handing over healthcare to his party's left wing, he had lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might have got healthcare through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may now stand a chance of getting a climate bill.

Yglesias points out that Obama did, in fact, offer tort reform to conservatives, quoting Time's Karen Tumulty (5/5/09) on a meeting between Obama and congressional Republicans:

Obama said he was willing to curb malpractice awards, a move long sought by Republicans that is certain to bring strong opposition from the trial lawyers who fund the Democratic Party.

What, he wanted to know, did the Republicans have to offer in return?

Nothing, it turned out. Republicans were unprepared to make any concessions, if they had any to make.

More broadly, of course, Obama turned healthcare over not to his party's left wing but to his party's right wing, in the person of Max Baucus (the 10th most conservative Democratic senator, according to VoteView), who famously spent months unsuccessfully trying to craft a bipartisan compromise with Republican colleagues.  Can you really follow U.S. politics at all and not be aware of this?

As for nuclear power,  Obama made his call for a "new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants" in his January 27 State of the Union speech, and in the month that's followed it has produced no Republican support for climate legislation--predictably enough.

How can people who get paid to pay attention to the Washington political scene get it so wrong? There is a bias built into the D.C. press corps that Democrats' problems are on the left and their solutions are to the right. As Extra! wrote back in 1992, looking back at the elections of '84 and '88: "When the 'pragmatists' lose badly with their centrist approach, they are repainted after the fact as radicals, so the strategy of tilting to the right can be tried again and again." That's what's was done with Bill Clinton after he ran into political trouble.  And now it's happening to Obama.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (12/6/09) thinks there's something wrong with left-wing critics of Barack Obama. As his lead put it:

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.

 Milbank starts with Michael Moore, who wrote an open letter urging Obama not to escalate the Afghanistan war. This makes no sense to Milbank, since Obama never said he'd withdraw troops. Well, yes. I suspect many of Obama's critics--maybe even Michael Moore--are aware of that.  Moore also supports single-payer healthcare, and wishes Obama would too. Does that mean that continuing that advocacy with Obama in the White House is a waste of time? Or is the idea that no one should ever advocate for any political cause that upsets the power structure?

Maybe that'd be OK with Dana Milbank. As he put it,  Obama is an "incrementalist....  His Afghanistan policy, likewise, is above all a pragmatic, nonideological strategy." Opposing that policy, then, is ideological and anti-pragmatic.

Milbank closes with this:

You'd think his supporters might applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership as a repudiation of the Bush style of government by political theory. Instead, they're using words such as "O'Bomber" to describe the president. MoveOn.org launched a petition drive against the policy. Code Pink, the group that heckled Bush officials for years, heckled Obama advisers on Capitol Hill last week. The liberal Web publisher Arianna Huffington told Charlie Rose that the policy "puts into question his whole leadership."

Moveon's petition is not  "against the policy"--their petition, if anything, supports it, since it only calls on Congress "to push the Obama administration to outline firm benchmarks and a binding timeline."

Code Pink is against the war; the fact that they're still against is a sign of their consistency.  Milbank might see the process by which Obama decided to escalate the war "thoughtful," but if resulting policy is one you oppose, you continue to oppose it. 

Arianna Huffington, likewise, is saying she opposes Obama's decision, based on a variety of factors. Milbank's point, at face value, is that these people should have all been clear-eyed about Obama's position. That's obviously true--and some of them were. But one gets the sense that his real point is that those to the left of Obama should just leave him alone.

Time columnist Joe Klein (12/3/09)was not altogether impressed by Obama's announcement of a 30,000 troop escalation in Afghanistan (an "iffy proposition," as Klein put it). But Klein's main point was that Obama should have justified the war differently: "Once you have made the decision to go, or to redouble your efforts, you must lead the charge--passionately and, yes, with a touch of anger."

Then he describes the better way:

Ronald Reagan would have done it differently. He would have told a story. It might not have been a true story, but it would have had resonance. He might have found, or created, a grieving spouse--a young investment banker whose wife had died in the World Trade Center--who enlisted immediately after the attacks ... and then gave his life, heroically, defending a school for girls in Kandahar. Reagan would have inspired tears, outrage, passion, a rush to recruiting centers across the nation.

It's hard to know what's creepier: suggesting that a president should lie to drum up support for a war, or suggesting he should do so to fight a war you're not so sure about in the first place.

A meeting of the minds between NBC host Chris Matthews and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius (Chris Matthews Show, 11/29/09):

IGNATIUS: The long period of analysis, very deliberative, robs this of passion. This is--he was going to be a wartime president now, and he has to sell the country on the idea that our young men and women are going to go there, fight and get killed.

MITCHELL: Yes.

IGNATIUS: And, you know, I think this, you know, this is not going to....

MATTHEWS: So too much Chamberlain, not enough Churchill.

IGNATIUS: Well, too much--too much college professor.

Remember back in 2007/2008 when Democratic candidate Barack Obama was being called an elitist? Well, if you miss that kind of media coverage, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank has got you covered (9/18/09) here, writing up Michelle Obama's visit to a D.C. farmers market:

The promotion of organic and locally grown food, though an admirable cause, is a risky one for the Obamas, because there's a fine line between promoting healthful eating and sounding like a snob. The president, when he was a candidate in 2007, got in trouble in Iowa when he asked a crowd, "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?" Iowans didn't have a Whole Foods.

Former President Jimmy Carter's statement (NBC, 9/15/09)  that "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," has generated widespread discussion in the corporate media. But few of the many analyses of Carter's remarks give you much of a sense of why one might think that many of Obama's foes are motivated by racism.

No one can look into another person's heart, of course. But many of Obama's most prominent critics have talked enough about the president and race to provide plenty of evidence about where they're coming from.  And no one has been more revealing of their inner demons than Rush Limbaugh; who can forget this classic too-much-information rant?

We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.

Strikingly, the same day Carter made his supposedly controversial comments about racism and Obama critics, Limbaugh (9/15/09) was engaged in all-out race-baiting over a schoolbus fight that was initially reported as a racial incident:

It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on," and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

If that's not an expression of a racial animus, what would qualify?  Why is it more controversial to criticize people who issue hateful rants like this than it is to make them in the first place?

The New York Times (9/13/09) attempted to fact check a Barack Obama speech on healthcare. By all appearances, this is in the regular, non-satirical edition of the paper:

Mr. Obama opened his 40-minute speech with what he called "disturbing news": a report from the Treasury Department that, he said, "found that nearly half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next 10 years” and that “more than one-third will go without coverage for longer than one year."

In fact, that is not precisely what the department found when it analyzed data from a University of Michigan survey that tracked the health insurance status of more than 17,000 Americans from 1997 to 2006.

The survey found that 47.7 percent had lost coverage at some point during those 10 years for one month or more, and that 36 percent lacked coverage for at least one year during that time, though not necessarily 12 months consecutively. Mr. Obama extrapolated those statistics to predict what might happen in the future.

Critics say that the president, who has deplored the "scare tactics" of his opponents, is now employing scare tactics of his own.

Huh. In case you didn't follow that: Obama cited a study with some striking numbers on workers losing their health insurance. That's indeed what the study found....  BUT, explains the Times, his presentation is misleading because the future could be radically different from the very recent past. Or as Dean Baker put it, "President Obama was making extrapolations about the future based on the past. Next thing he'll be telling us that black is white and night is day. This is why we need an independent media."

"It is difficult to overstate President Obama's unpopularity in most of Louisiana," writes Campbell Robertson in a front-page New York Times article  (9/11/09). Yet Robertson managed to pull it off.

Robertson continues: "He lost handily to Senator John McCain here, picking up only 14 percent of the white vote. (The state is roughly two-thirds white.)" Fourteen percent? Wow, that is unpopular! But given that black and other non-white people have been able to vote in Louisiana for several decades now, wouldn't it make sense to give the actual share of the vote Obama received? That would be 40 percent, which is a pretty disappointing electoral result, but Obama did worse in six other states--and McCain did as bad or worse in 12 states. Yet it would be pretty easy, I would think, to overstate McCain's unpopularity in, say, Maine.

The problem here is treating white opinion as representative of the opinions of the public at large. ("In Louisiana, Tainted Senator Rides Anti-Obama Sentiment" is the print headline.) It's a subtler form of the crude analysis Chris Matthews used to do when Obama was running for the Democratic nomination: "How's he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community?"

The Times piece is mainly about the re-election prospects of Sen. David Vitter, but it takes time out for a look back at a recent special election race for a Louisiana State Senate seat. The lone Republican in the three-way race bashed his opponents with a flier--which accompanies the story as a graphic--featuring a smiling hippie and the text, "You might be a liberal if you...voted for Barack Obama." But the punchline of the story is that one of the Democrats beat the Republican in the runoff election, 54 percent to 46 percent, which would seem to undercut the story's contention that Obama is to Louisiana voters as garlic is to vampires. But the next line in Robertson's story is, "So given Louisiana's increasingly reddish hue, the prevailing political wisdom is that a real threat to Mr. Vitter would come from his right." Illustrating the old journalism adage: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

What "surprises" Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik (8/30/09) more than this summer's news full of "baroque conspiracy theories" and "weepy hysteria" is "the idea that these are somehow unprecedented."

Hiltzik looks back to an earlier era of supposed presidential "socialism" in the U.S. to see such current claims as "merely the latest examples of a phenomenon that might be called Wirtism"--a label Hiltzik "just coined... to honor the memory of William A. Wirt":

Wirt's day in the sun came back in 1934, when the obscure Midwestern blowhard placed himself at the center of a political maelstrom by "discovering" a plot by members of Franklin Roosevelt's Brain Trust to launch a Bolshevik takeover of the United States.

That Wirt's yarn was transparently absurd didn't keep it from being taken seriously on the front pages of newspapers coast to coast, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. He gave speeches, wrote a book and went to Washington to give personal testimony at a standing-room-only congressional hearing.

If that reminds you of the overly solicitous treatment given by the press, cable news programs and Republican office holders to purveyors of such lurid claptrap as the Obama birth certificate story or the fantasy of healthcare "death panels," now you know why it pays to study history.

One "reason not to chuckle condescendingly at Wirt," Hiltzik warns, "is the thought of what might happen were he to walk the Earth today," when Hiltzik thinks that "rather than being disowned in embarrassment, he'd be lionized as a purveyor of an alternate truth" while "given a gig on cable news and touted as a presidential contender for 2012."

Printing a letter to the editor from Leila McDowell (8/26/09), the New York Times has "Another Look at Obama's Speech to the NAACP"--from the group's on vice president of communications.

McDowell starts with the fact that the "Times distinguished itself from most major media by virtually ignoring the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, which was started in New York"--and then, "when the Times finally did send a reporter...the resulting article ("Obama Gives Fiery Address at NAACP," July 17) focused on personal responsibility," even though "that was the least prominent part of Mr. Obama's speech":

What was noteworthy was his discussion of racial disparities, the barriers facing African-Americans and the policies to redress social gaps.

This is a theme President Obama has rarely spoken about with such depth.

Urging personal responsibility in our communities is as traditional as shouting "Amen!" to the preacher's sermon in black churches and civic organizations.

What is new is the president's forceful articulation of the disparities we fight every day. Personal responsibility will not remove the barriers that a legacy of racism and exclusion has left for millions of African-Americans.

"The familiar refrain of personal responsibility," though "an important issue... articulated by black preachers long before Mr. Obama," is, McDowell writes, "an old story and standard fare." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Dedrick Muhammad on Obama's NAACP Speech and 'Tough Love'" (7/31/09).

In his Time column this week, Klein writes:

So what should Obama do about Afghanistan? His dilemma isn't as stark as has been posed in recent press accounts, with screamers on the right demanding slavish devotion to the military's wish list and screamers on the left demanding a withdrawal. The U.S. military has become far more ... nuanced when it comes to making requests of presidents. The negotiations about what [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal can officially request will not take place anywhere near the public eye. It is very likely that more troops will be sent--to build and train the Afghan security forces, it will be said. Obama's problems on the left will be mitigated by the fact that most Democrats have also supported this war--as opposed to Iraq's--and have little desire to reverse themselves. They don't want to hurt the President, and they don't want to be perceived as weak on defense come election time.

OK, "screamers on the left" are demanding withdrawal. That would make "the left" the majority of the public, right? Klein counsels that left opposition will have little effect, since "most Democrats have also supported this war--as opposed to Iraq's--and have little desire to reverse themselves."  It's hard to figure out why this is true, or frankly why it would matter--the general public has reversed its opinion quite dramatically, hasn't it?

Apparently that doesn't much matter;  the real issue here are the Democratic politicians, who "don't want to hurt the president, and they don't want to be perceived as weak on defense come election time." Funny, then, that the public doesn't seem to mind being seen as "weak on defense," if that's really how one would describe opposition to escalating the war in Afghanistan.

Longtime friend of FAIR Sam Husseini (Husseini.org, 8/21/09) has a new blog post responding to Robert Kuttner's recent Washington Post column, in which the American Prospect magazine editor "asks 'Where are the liberal protesters?'":

It seems like a good question. Until one considers the source of the complaint--and that rather helps answer the question.

Maybe the "liberal protests" are where the American Prospect's cover story of the "Baucus 13" is.Or the where the American Prospect's lengthy piece on Linda Allision's exchange with Obama is.

Since clicking on the above links yields absolutely zero results in the American Prospect coverage, Husseini urges you to "read up on the 'Baucus 13' and Linda Allison's questioning of Obama" while asking, "If 'liberal' mags like the American Prospect were serious about reform, wouldn't they have relentlessly plugged the 'Baucus 13' and Linda Allison?"

WashingtonMonthly.com blogger Steve Benen (Political Animal, 8/12/09) has words for corporate pundits lambasting Barack Obama's "Attention to Detail" as "going "into the weeds":

A few weeks ago, MSNBC's First Read had an item questioning whether President Obama "knows too much" about healthcare policy. The piece complained that the president is willing to offer Americans details about reform....

The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman raised a similar concern today, arguing that Obama cares too much about policy details....

This, apparently, is criticism, not praise. The president who inherited a devastating economic crisis is interested in U6 numbers--a measure that includes the unemployed, those who are working part-time but want full-time employment, and those who've simply given up--and this, we're told, is somehow evidence of excessive interest in detail.

Benen thinks that too-skeptical-for-the-Washington Post Dan Froomkin "has this just right" when writing that "there are all sorts of legitimate reasons to be concerned about Obama's approach to governing" but "intellectual curiosity is one thing journalists in particular should celebrate, not sneer at."

In Benen's closing thoughts he really "can't help but wonder if" reporters might simply "prefer a more superficial president because they have a more superficial perspective?"

Glenn Greenwald has responded via his regular Salon feature (8/6/09, ad-viewing required) to Rush Limbaugh, "speaking to his audience of 15 million, compar[ing] Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler and Nancy Pelosi to Nazi leaders," by asking you to instead

compare (a) the way that a single anonymous person's comparison of Bush and Hitler swamped our political discourse and forever altered the image of MoveOn with (b) what the (non)-reaction will be to the identical comparison coming from the leader of the Republican Party who spouts his hate-mongering to an audience of 15 million people. Within that comparison one finds many central truths about how our political debates and media discussions function.

Looking beyond how corporate media pilloried Democratic activist group MoveOn over user-submitted (and never-published) video, Greenwald gives a maddeningly extensive history of corporate media compliance with right-wingers' Nazi smears, and simultaneous reprobation of even spurious such instances from the left.

See the FAIR Action Alert: "When Are Nazi Comparisons Deplorable?: For Fox News, Only When Republicans Are the Target" (1/16/04).

Reporting for Associated Press (7/3/09), David Bauder has an update on CNN's insistence on "standing behind" Lou Dobbs, who has "become a publicity nightmare for CNN, embarrassed his boss and...on top of all that, his ratings are slipping."

Bauder asks outright: "How does Lou Dobbs keep his job" while plugging the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama "wasn't born in the United States despite convincing evidence to the contrary"?

Dobbs' work has been so unpopular that even Ann Coulter has criticized him.

Dobbs has acknowledged that he believes Obama was born in Hawaii. But he gives airtime to disbelievers, and has said the president should try to put questions fully to rest by releasing a long version of his birth certificate. He's twice done stories on his show after the public leak of a memo from CNN U.S. president Jon Klein saying that "it seems this story is dead."

To be clear, "Klein said those stories were OK because they were about the controversy and weren't actually questioning the facts."

But Bauder reports that "critics suggest Klein is parsing words, that even raising the issue lends it credence"--such criticism even coming from "the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes: It 'explains their upcoming documentary: "The World: Flat. We Report—You Decide."'"