What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama - NYTimes.com

One needs to count votes. There are criticisms to be made of President Obama (mine is failure to vigorously defend the Keynesian stimulus approach) but weakness is not one.   Elihu Root famously said that a lawyer spends half his time telling his clients they are bloody fools.  Same for presidents. The key message is we can borrow what we need now, restore prosperity, and  control deficits and health care spending in the long run.  - GWC

Jonathan Chait explains:

What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama - NYTimes.com: "President Obama underestimated the depth of the crisis in 2009 and left himself with bad options in the event the economy failed to recover as quickly as he hoped. And yet the wave of criticism from the left over the stimulus is fundamentally flawed: it ignores the real choices Obama faced (and the progressive decisions he made) and wishes away any constraints upon his power.

The most common hallmark of the left’s magical thinking is a failure to recognize that Congress is a separate, coequal branch of government consisting of members whose goals may differ from the president’s. "
'via Blog this'

TNR: Why the health care bill is the greatest social achievement of our time.

The New Republic

And the Rest Is Just Noise

Why the health care bill is the greatest social achievement of our time.

At some level, it is possible to understand the roots of liberal frustration. The machinery of Congress has ground away at the health care bill, as it does to almost any bill. But at a broader level, the liberal mood is insane. What has emerged from that machinery is not merely “better than nothing” or “a good start.” It is the most significant American legislative triumph in at least four decades. Why can so few people see that?

- Jonathan Chait

For his full reasoning click HERE.

Thanks for the tip to James Fallows. Embarrassing to admit, but James Fallows only grabbed my attention about a year ago. Better late than never. It was his analysis of the Democratic primary debates in The Atlantic that got my attention. Then I found his blog - and his observations during the last of this three years in China and I was hooked. No regrets.