"Why Obama Is Losing the Political War" (Mark Halperin 10/11 2010)

Why Obama Is Losing the Political War
By Mark Halperin Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Barack Obama is being politically crushed in a vise. From above, by elite opinion about his competence. From below, by mass anger and anxiety over unemployment. And it is too late for him to do anything about this predicament until after November's elections.

With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters. This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democratic business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle.

(See Obama's troubled first year, issue by issue.)
On Friday, after the release of the latest bleak unemployment data — the last major jobs figures before the midterms — Obama said, "Putting the American people back to work, expanding opportunity, rebuilding the economic security of the middle class is the moral and national challenge of our time." But elites feel the President has failed to meet that challenge and are convinced he will be unable to do so in the remainder of his term. Moreover, there is a growing perception that Obama's decisions are causing harm — that businesses are being hurt by the Administration's legislation and that economic recovery is stalling because of the uncertainty surrounding energy policy, health care, deficits, housing, immigration and spending.

And that sentiment is spreading. Many members of the general public appear deeply skeptical of Obama's capacity to turn things around, especially, but not exclusively, those inclined to dislike him — Tea Partyers and John McCain voters, but also tens of millions of middle-class Americans, including quite a few who turned out for Obama in 2008.


-snip
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2024718,00.html#ixzz1Qn6MA3U3

TO THOSE WHO QUESTION WHY HALPERIN'S "DICK" STATEMENT MATTERS, THIS ARTICLE SUMS IT UP. HIS BIASED BS IS IN TIME MAGAZINE, AND ALTHOUGH DUers DON'T BOTHER WITH READING THIS PUBLICATION, IT IS PRACTICALLY IN EVERY WAITING ROOM IN THE COUNTRY. AS Editor-at-large and senior political analyst for TIME, HALPERIN HAS A LOT OF CLOUT. THIS STATEMENT EXPOSED HIM AS THE BIASED POLITICAL HACK THAT HE IS.

Especially after 9/11 (which could have been prevented).

Halperin belongs on Fox.

You stupid hack.

letters@time.com

From another DU thread quoting Salon.


Being a professional observer of the "horse race" is bad enough, but Halperin doesn't even understand the horse-race element of politics. He fails at being a hack. He's too dumb to correctly parrot conventional wisdom. He is pretty sure Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are 2012 front-runners. He thought "suspending his campaign" to fix the economy and not knowing how many houses he has were both huge messaging victories for John McCain. He wrote a book about how to win in 2008 that predicted everything Hillary did, but in his world it all worked. He thought Bush's political comeback would come any day now throughout the entirety of the years 2006-2008. He can't interpret polls or see through the spin of GOP consultants who are much smarter than he. If I were revising the Hack list I'd put him above

Can anyone name a single thing this hack or any other Republican has been correct about in the last two decades?

Not steal them. Just put them where all the garbage goes.

Don

The guy was used to having a 7 day day delay (weekly news mag) and then thought he had a 7 second delay.

Maybe now Time can hire someone with a vocabulary that isn't stuck in the 7th grade.

Today's comment will be what people think about whenever they read or listen to him.

Sometimes it's not fair when someone is characterized by some headline-grabbing comment or action, but this time it's well-deserved.