Two weeks after being sworn into office, the left is in full retreat. They're scattered and panicked. Michael Hirsh opens his column as though Obama's presidency will be determined by the events of the next few days:
Barack Obama began making his comeback Wednesday, apparently aware that he has all but lost control of the agenda in Washington at a time when he simply can't afford to do so. Obama's biggest problem isn't Taxgate-which resulted in the Terrible Tuesday departure of his trusted friend, Tom Daschle, and the defanging of his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. Nor is the No. 1 problem that the president can't seem to win a single Republican vote for his stimulus package. That's a symptom, not a cause. The reason Obama is getting so few votes is that he is no longer setting the terms of the debate over how to save the economy. Instead the Republican Party-the one we thought lost the election-is doing that. And the confusion and delay this is causing could realize Obama's worst fears, turning "crisis into a catastrophe," as the president said Wednesday.
Making a comeback? It's been two weeks. If Obama has already lost control of the agenda, then he never had it, which means a routed Republican party has managed to outmaneuver the the man variously declared as the heir to JFK, FDR, and Lincoln. Imagine what Ahmadinejad or Chavez might do.
HIrsh and others on the left can't blame the legislation itself, that would require them to indict the entire Democratic party and the liberal interest groups that dictate to it. But, apparently the left is prepared to concede that Obama's first two weeks have been a failure, in Hirsh's words "a Pickett's Charge -- without the benefit of being led by Pickett." (The only real bright spot for the left has been the signing of a series of executive orders that included the closing of Gitmo, which recent polling shows to be almost as unpopular as the stimulus, and a pledge to prohibit torture that's riddled with loopholes.)
Of course, as Hirsh says, Obama will make a comeback. If the stimulus passes, the victory will be declared Obama's first great triumph. If it doesn't, whatever success he has another two weeks from now will get the same treatment. Still, it's striking how eight years of believing the president to be a failure and his every battle a defeat has prepared Democrats to turn on their own champion at the first sign of trouble. Newsweek already printed a cover story calling the war in Afghanistan "Obama's Vietnam." Now days later they're declaring defeat on the domestic front as well. It's pathetic.
