populism

John Merline: "The Richest 1% Get $10 Billion A Year From Uncle Sam"

Ben Smith: "Israel rift roils Democratic ranks"

Tim Carney: "Obama and the special interests"

From charisma to populism—this is the slippery slope down which Barack Obama has been sliding over the past two years. In June 2008, Obama the candidate described his nomination as “the moment when .  .  . our planet began to heal.” In June 2010, Obama the president promised his partisans he would find an “ass to kick.” 

It was a good week for proclamations, with Washington conservative leaders, tea party activists, and the GOP all touting statements of principle as thousands of conservatives came to town for the annual CPAC conference. The GOP’s statement has yet to be released, but each group’s intentions have nonetheless been scrutinized and parsed by the media in what feels like a political version of the eHarmony compatibility test. 

First, it was the spending freeze that sent economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman into a tantrum, saying that Obama "liquidated himself" by "embrac[ing] and validat[ing] the Republican world-view."

In the new movie The Young Victoria, the mother of Victoria and her chief overseer meet with the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to discuss what role they’ll play now that Victoria has become queen of England.  They’ve waged a fierce struggle to retain control over Victoria.  Suddenly Melbourne cuts off the chatter and bluntly explains the situation.  “You lost,” he says.

That’s the situation that faces President Obama and his White House advisers.  Months of polls on the president and his policies, the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s elections, then last week’s momentous Massachusetts Senate race – all have sent the blunt message to Obama that, for now, he’s lost.  But Obama and his team insist on pretending it’s not true.

Enough is enough. That is the message the most reliably Democratic state in America sent to President Obama and his Democratic congress Tuesday when its voters chose Republican Scott Brown to represent them in the U.S. Senate. The majority of Americans style themselves as somewhere between centrist and center-right, and were not happy to see centrist candidate Obama morph into leftist President Obama. He pressed for a government takeover of the health care system, and government involvement in the banking, energy, auto, insurance and other sectors. And he launched a spending spree that will leave future generations to pick up the bill for huge deficits.