Grab your coffee, and join me again with Rich
I needed to read this today and so did/will you:
This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”
For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.
I think this is very true. Digby has said many times that the DC establishment is rigged for Republicans, because they had been running it for so long. If you listened to the media only, Republicans did a great job and Obama is damaged. I hope the Obama people have internalized the message that the media is still set against them and they will have to go around them to get their message heard.
Who’s Rich? Link please…
So much of what Obama is doing is common sense and basic courtesy. Two things that people easily understand. Call his reaching across the aisle sincere or staged – it doesn’t matter. He reached. And while most of us could have predicted the Republican response to that gesture, it wasn’t guaranteed.
I am amused by the triumphalism of wingnuts who are all puffed up about the fact that they stood on principle.
Hilarious stuff.
Mike, here’s the link
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Ahh…Frank Rich. I should have known. Thanks, DHB.
Josh Marshall over at TPM has a similar observation and point as Rich about the disconnect between Washington and everywhere else — sparked by an observation from an Iowa pollster that the news doesn’t jive with the mood of the Midwesterners she is surveying.
This reminds me of the story told about Axelrod and Plouffe asking their staffs to NOT read the blogs and so-called opinion makers and pundits. The idea being that Mark Halperin and Politico and the usual suspects were purveyors of the DC POV — a POV that was never going to be useful to communicating with folks outside of DC. It looks as though Team Obama is coming to the same conclusion about governing too.
Indeed, the SNL opening skit parodied the insular world that the GOP finds itself in. Hysterical.
Mr Obama is clueless.
Read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/washington/06envoy.html
Mr. Protack is clueless. Read any of his comments here in his new moniker.