Eighteen months ago, the United States elected its first African American president, Barack Obama, who came to power at a time of extraordinary challenge:<\/p>\n
His administration faced two faltering wars, a crippled economy, and a toxic political climate in Washington DC and around the country.<\/p>\n
Conservatives quickly, and very reasonably, formed ranks against his policies and ideas.<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama certainly isn’t a socialist — that’s nonsense — but he wanted to do things that the vast majority of Republicans don’t like.<\/p>\n
The health care reform act, financial reform, the jobs stimulus bill, the jobs-saving bailout of GM, those are just a few of the substantial realignments of America’s society and economy that right-leaning voters oppose.<\/p>\n
In the next few weeks, Mr. Obama is also likely to lead the effort to defeat the Bush-era tax cuts, which largely favored the wealthiest people in our country.<\/p>\n
If he succeeds, he’ll likely do so with only one or two Republican votes.<\/p>\n
The weird part of this drama isn’t that conservatives have fought the President’s agenda hammer and tong.<\/p>\n
On the contrary, it’s a healthy part of our democracy that they are providing a completely different vision, giving us all a clear choice.\u00a0 (I’ll blog more about what those choices look like in the days ahead.)<\/p>\n
No, the Twilight Zone part of this story is the growing number of liberals who already — eighteen months after the start of Mr. Obama’s first term — want to throw him under the bus.<\/p>\n
In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books<\/a>, Frank Rich has a lengthy essay called “Why Has He Fallen Short?”<\/p>\n With no hint of humor, Rich uses terms like “nadir” and “doomed” to describe the state of Mr. Obama’s presidency.<\/p>\n