Ramesh Ponnuru—“Yes, I am a partisan hack. Why do you ask?”

Several dog years ago I pegged, or tabbed, Ramesh Ponnuru as an intelligent conservative. Obviously, Ramesh resented the charge and has been doing his level best to refute it. He’s at it again here, with the seriously fatuous “Obama’s Second Term Already Looks Like a Failure,” aggressively gliding over such Republican embarrassments as the virtual collapse of the the party’s whole anti-gay marriage position, which is rapidly becoming a so five minutes ago thing, and, more importantly, immigration.

Ramesh tells us that this is not quite the done deal that “official Washington” thinks it to be, which is quite possible, but if it isn’t—and even if it is—the Republican Party is likely to be the one that suffers. Marco Rubio has gone out on a serious limb for this, and it’s difficult to see how he’s going to climb back. Even if President Obama is the “unreasonable” one, if immigration reform collapses, I don’t see how Rubio could be the Republican nominee in 2016, which is likely to be his best shot, since Americans continue to like new faces for their presidents. The Republican Party is very seriously split on this issue, and I don’t see a “best” solution for them.

Naturally, Ramesh doesn’t want to deal with this. Instead, he nit-picks on Obama, basically repeating Bob Woodward’s stale and dishonest charge that the President hasn’t “worked his will” in an appropriately Johnsonian/Reaganesque manner. And, of course, he doesn’t explore the possibility that Obama’s second term will be a hell of a lot better than George Bush’s.

Afterwords
If Ramesh wanted to argue that the President has “failed” on civil liberties and basic morality, well, yeah, totally. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s on his mind.