Liberal blogs have given Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman a well-deserved slapping around for his recent column announcing that the “Establishment” has decided that President Obama is, well, a loser. Mind you, Howard isn’t saying this, he’s just repeating the “mumbling” that he’s heard. Now, some of it may be contradictory, inaccurate, etc., etc., etc., and Howard, of course, doesn’t vouch for any of it—so don’t blame him!—he’s just reporting what important people are saying, that’s all.
Of course, all these “important” people are simply Howard and his friends, who want Obama to administer “harsh justice” on the greedy capitalists who have gotten us into this mess, even though it’s not the President, but the courts, who make these decisions. (And isn’t “harsh justice” just a bit of a contradiction in terms? Well, never mind. Howard and his pals want blood!)
According to Howard, the café crowd also thinks Obama is way out of line in allowing Congress to write the laws when, so it appears, that’s the President’s job as well. If you read through the whole, whiny list it becomes clear that the real rap against Obama is that he’s not a magician. It was his job to wave his magic wand and make all this mess disappear. But this mess is a mess the like of which none of us has ever seen—none of us under eighty, at least. It’s likely that unemployment will match the post-war record of 10.8 percent set back in the Reagan Administration. Stocks will stay down for four or five years, or even more. Housing prices won’t come back to bubble levels (why should they?) until the economy has expanded substantially, which it won’t be doing any time soon. And to rag on the President because he hasn’t made all this go away in a matter of weeks is beyond childish.
Afterwords
Glen Greenwald, as might be expected, dropped several megatons of Greenwaldian wrath on poor Howard’s Chablis-sippin’, brie-nippin’ head, which he almost deserved. Glen also links to other outraged liberals here and here. (You have to scroll down a little to find Glenn hitting Howard, because he has to bitchslap Ruth “Let Torturers Walk” Marcus and Richard “Totally! Let Bygones Be Bygones!” Cohen for their lack of humanity. If Ruth and Dick had any humanity, I’d defend them.)
The Wall Street Journal today says that 49 economists gave the President a rating of 59 out of 100, which the Journal says is an “F” without actually saying that the economists understood that below “60” was an “F.” The major rap that the Administration deserved was for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s piss-poor performance unveiling a bank-salvation plan that consisted of about thirty minutes of uncomfortable silence. Geithner had a very bad hand—the condition of the banks is terrible, and Congress is sick and tired of handing out hundreds of billions of dollars without getting a dime of political credit in return—but his performance was abysmal, and it cost him, and the Administration, dearly.
