As progressive criticism of the Obama administration has intensified,  the critics of the critics have stepped forward to defend the White House. Much of the case comes down to saying that Obama's lefty critics don't know how the game is played in Washington.

Jonathan Chait from the New Republic had a New York Times Magazine piece this weekend (9/4/11) taking issue with Obama critics like Glenn Greenwald, accusing them of "magical thinking" about the power of the presidency. As the argument goes, Congress can stop what the White House wants to do, so you can't blame Obama for not winning more progressive victories.

I am fairly certain that people like Greenwald or Paul Krugman know how Congress works. Their criticism of Obama is more substantive--that the policies he advocates aren't very good even before one factors in what Eric Cantor or John Boehner are going to say about them.

The next part of his critique was even less convincing. Chait wrote that Obama's liberal critics think he should have been bolder on the economy, but there's a problem:

It's worth recalling that several weeks before Obama proposed an $800 billion stimulus, House Democrats had floated a $500 billion stimulus. (Oddly, this never resulted in liberals portraying Nancy Pelosi as a congenitally timid right-wing enabler.) At the time, Obama’s $800 billion stimulus was seen by Congress, pundits and business leaders--that is to say, just about everybody who mattered--as mind-bogglingly large. News reports invariably described it as "huge," "massive" or other terms suggesting it was unrealistically large, even kind of pornographic. The favored cliché used to describe the reaction in Congress was "sticker shock."

If I'm understanding this correctly, Chait is saying that media coverage of the debate over the stimulus was terribly misleading. That seems true. But how does that have any bearing on what his critics are saying? As this Firedoglake post pointed out, plenty of nonentities like Dean Baker, James Galbraith and Mark Zandi argued at the time that the stimulus wasn't large enough. If Chait's point is that these economists "don't matter" in elite circles, he might have a point. But that's a very different critique than the one he's making--and one that actually makes a lot more sense than his other argument.

New Republic blogger Jonathan Chait (4/11/10) criticizes Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas for comparing the Republican Party to the Taliban, noting that the latter engages in "wanton torture and violence."

Glenn Greenwald (8/27/09, ad-viewing required) of Salon's series of New Republic quotes morphing from condemning a perceived "anti-Lieberman jihad" to calling for "knocking off Democrats like Conrad and Joe Lieberman" charts the outlet's "rapid and total reversal--one effectuated without the slightest acknowledgment that it even occurred."

Calling the change "just the accountability-free nature of Beltway punditry," Greenwald also spies "a more important point highlighted here":

namely, it is a sign of how dysfunctional the Democratic Party is--and how meaningless is their glorious super-majority--that even the New Republic, which long prided itself on safeguarding the party from nefarious left-wing influences, is now calling for "centrist" Democratic senators (even including Joe Lieberman) to be thrown out of office by means of primary challenges (I believe that was once called a "purity purge"), even if doing so results in a loss of Democratic seats. [TNR editor Jonathan] Chait's rationale is that allowing "centrist" dominance within the party means that the same corporate interests (rather than the interests of constituents) and the same political agenda end up being served regardless of which party is in control, meaning that--as he put it--even "a filibuster-proof Democratic majority isn't worth having" because nothing meaningful changes. You don't say.

But, notes Greenwald, "that, of course, was exactly the motivating premise of those who sought to remove Joe Lieberman from the Senate in 2006." Those were "the people Chait demonized back then as 'left-wing fanatics' who 'refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.'"