Jonathan Chait, having discovered that Obama isn’t that liberal, prefers not to be reminded of that fact

Last week, Jonathan Chait, heretofore one of President Obama’s most passionate defenders, wrote a bitter piece in New York magazine entitled “How Obama Tried to Sell Out Liberalism in 2011,” bouncing off the latest “what went wrong” tick-tock in a long series of what went wrong tick-tocks on the Obama Administration, this one written by Peter Wallsten, Lori Montgomery and Scott Wilson and appearing in Tick Tock Central, the Washington Post. The Wallsten, Montgomery/Wilson piece explained how, in last summer’s frenzied negotiations over the nation’s debt ceiling, Obama bent over, not simply backwards but actually tied himself into what amounted to, politically, a double möbius band, nearly projecting himself into the fourth dimension, but still not satisfying the Tea Party Republicans, who basically wanted his resignation—and Joe’s too, of course.

In his article, Chait sourly summarized the matter as follows:

“Last summer, President Obama desperately attempted to forge a long-term deficit reduction deal with Congressional Republicans. The notion that he could get the House GOP to accept any remotely balanced agreement was preposterous and doomed from the start, but Obama responded to the increasingly obvious reality by reducing his demands of the Republicans to virtually nothing.”

Which prompted Glenn Greenwald, long not a fan of liberals like Chait who insist on defending Cap’n Killer Drone, to snicker that Chait was turning into the sort of person he used to criticize. “Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president,” Johnnie? I think you’re talking about yourself!

Well, having his words quoted back at him makes Johnnie a little testy. When he criticized liberals who were “incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president,” he wasn’t talking about himself! He was talking about those other liberals! You know, like Glenn Greenwald!

Afterwords
If Jonathan had read, and taken to heart, “the Big Split,” a recent piece in his old alma mater, the New Republic, by Alec MacGillis, which describes how earnestly Obama has labored to do the bidding of Wall Street and “tame” entitlements (and how he has gotten the back of Wall Street’s hand for not making this problem go away for them), he might not be in such a snit. The Republicans, after all, talk (a lot) about cutting entitlements 10 years from now, but Obama cut Medicare in real time, and the Democrats suffered brutally as a result.