I’m with Marc Ash here – I still like President Obama, for a number of reasons, not just the ones he outlines here – personally, I think the President is doing an amazing job, especially against a disjointed Republican party that’s intent on just stopping any positive improvements he can make because they know the whole “saddle him with the problems and then blame him for all of it when he fails to fix it” isn’t going to work. He can fix it, he has the agenda, and he has the people behind him – they have to stop his activity and slow him down at all costs so they can continue to blame him for any negativity in the state of affairs.

President Obama also has to deal with a fractured Democratic party, a good portion of which is too conservative for its own good and unwilling to get in line behind some of America’s most needed priorities, like health care, jobs, and climate change. He’s got a lot of gridlock to deal with, and yet he manages to spend time pushing his agenda – and all without the help of his party, which is so busy defending itself.

Anyone who enrages Republican wing-nuts as effectively as Barack Obama can’t be all bad. In fairness, he does it without trying. In fact, just the opposite, he reaches out to them, which infuriates them all the more.

…

All of which can be argued to be “business as usual” for the American President. I guess what I like about Obama is that I get the sense that he would like to, for lack of a better word, change things. The missing link here is what kind of pressure is Obama facing behind closed doors? Even in the public realm we’re seeing unprecedented resistance to Obama’s attempts at reform, from conservative Republicans and Democrats alike.

I like the things Obama has tried to do: Health care reform, foreclosure mitigation, his comments on the outrageous decision by the Supreme Court’s five corporate lawyers to essentially duct-tape a for-sale sign to America’s electoral system. All of these things are a departure for an American President. He is indeed trying.

What concerns me are the things Obama has agreed to: An extension of the US Campaign in Afghanistan, an acceptance of the Bernanke-Geithner “Wall Street must be saved,” mantra, a don’t-ask don’t-tell policy on torture past and present.

I guess what redeems Obama for me is that he agrees to these things without losing his disdain for them. I wanted change, and in fairness change really hasn’t come yet. The intriguing thing is that Obama may actually want these changes too, and seems to. My impression is that he is meeting resistance in a number of significant forms.

Ash dives into the nature of the presidency and of how Obama may not have completely met up to the sweeping progressiveness that brought him into office (part of which I think is somewhat imagined frankly – I think a lot of progressives and liberals – myself included – made him into a super-liberal that he really never was, and never sold himself to be) but he’s pushing as hard or harder than anyone else could in this situation.

Ash also calls out a group that I’ve mentioned before too – fellow progressives.

The tea party crowd is merciless and relentless in their condemnation of Obama, but there is another group that stands just as ready to indict and convict Barack Obama: Progressives. Progressives are just as unyielding in their judgment of Obama, just as determined to derail, to thwart, to oppose, what they see as unacceptable governance. Progressive social objectives may be better reasoned and better argued, however, at the end of the day we may be seeing a Faustian synergy developing between two groups with diametrically opposed social agendas. Progressives and tea-baggers working on separate but parallel tracks to discredit the same president. Strange bedfellows indeed.

We now have a bona fide intellectual in the Oval Office – such things are rare. This is a man of understanding and insight, but his power to achieve change for good is not greater than the dedication of his supporters. Obama has to rally his supporters through a visible commitment to action, and his supporters must be willing to stand tall beside him.

[ I Still Like Obama ]
Source: Reader Supported News

And by “shocking” we mean “not shocking at all.”

Tana Ganeva, a fantastic writer at AlterNet and an enlightening follow on Twitter, has an interesting tidbit about the so-called “Tea Party” in the wake of their convention and their rabid display of force over the the CPAC event earlier this week. While the media loved all over CPAC and gave top billing to the radical right and its growing cancerous effect within the Republican Party, they were very busy in the halls of their convention proving exactly how unfit they are to lead anyone, much less their own movement, much less the national government as a whole.

Aside from some topics that I’ve mentioned already, specifically the fact that a lot of the Tea Party rage is your standard white male privilege protection, Ganeva points out that – predictably – the people who are so angry about the state of the government are the people benefiting from the old-boy, privileged system the most:

According to a new CNN poll (via TPM), a majority of respondents who had donated to a Tea Party group or participated in a Tea Party event were male, white, and identified as Protestant/Other Christian groups.

…So real, genuine Americans seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

None of this should be especially surprising. Most poor people scraping by in terrible, low-paying jobs — or with no jobs — probably don’t have the time to don three-cornered hats and scream about communism.

But there has been an MSM tendency to trumpet the movement as an eruption of populist rage by those crushed in the financial crisis. “Populism” liberals just don’t grasp, of course, because they’re all elitist and stuff. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reconsider our use of the word “elite” so it at least slightly correlates with things like money and privilege.

Yeah, that’s pretty sad, but again, entirely predictable. The media has been using the word “populist” in so many different ways that it’s difficult to really understand what the word means. When it was about enforcing new rules on Wall Street, the media termed it “populist rage.” Now again, when dealing with an extremely vocal but very certainly a minority group of rich white men trying to change their image to be “one of the people,” they’re using the term again when their agenda is anything but populist.

[ Shocking: Tea Partiers Mostly Rich, White, Christian Guys ]
Source: AlterNet

Take a good long look at that graph up there. The numbers are indisputable too – the kind of turnaround that President Obama has managed to cause in such a short period of time – and with the help of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the Stimulus Plan) is remarkable.

The White House also released a handy video to help people get up to speed with the effects of the plan and how much it’s probably helped them without them even knowing it:

The brilliant thing behind the chart and the video is that it shows that the White House is trying to get back in the saddle about shaping and controlling their message.

Almost just as importantly, this kind of message control is good for calling out Republican congresscritters for bashing the White House on the stimulus plan and then greedily sucking up money for their districts and happily spending it — all while lambasting the President and the government for so-called “wasteful spending;” — all while their home districts are profiting off of the hard work and political will of the President and Congressional Democrats. The truth-telling is becoming so loud that even one very prominent Republican is calling out his own party on their hypocrisy.

[ The Road to Recovery ]