John Hawkins has “A Round-Up Of Liberal Bloggers Eviscerating Robert Gibbs For Taking A Shot At Them.” And as I wrote yesterday, while this is a fun “pass the popcorn” moment, it’s also likely more than a little kabuki from the White House, allowing them to at least rhetorically triangulate towards the center.
Rhetorically, because the odds of Obama actually implementing centrist policies, as Bill Clinton did both because he had previously and relatively successfully governed a conservative southern state (executive experience before becoming a chief executive? Whooda thunkit?) and because the GOP-led Congress that took office in January of 1995 more or less forced him to, if he wanted to get re-elected the following year.
It’s also a reminder of something Peggy Noonan wrote in the summer of 2006, on the eve of the election that helped birth our current economic woes:
Here is my read on a lot of Democratic senators: They think they know more than their base and they think they’re more–how to put it?–stable in their view of the world than their base. In their hearts, in fact, they don’t really like their base. (They like–they love–the old base: old union guys who drink Schlitz and voted for FDR and JFK. But today those old union guys are mostly dead, dying or Republican.)
Democratic leaders in Washington are in a worse position than Republican leaders in Washington. Neither likes their base, really, and both think they are smarter. But the Democrats think, deep down, that their base is barking mad. The Republicans don’t. They just think their base is a bore.
Hopefully the latter is true, since the base re-actualized itself in early 2009 after decades of being taken for granted by the GOP, and demonized by the Democrats’ political media post-industrial complex.
Which brings us to Harry Reid — who joins what Gibbs calls “The Professional Left” big time with his latest horrific gaffe:
“I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”
But then, second only to to former Senator Joe Biden, Reid’s sensitive nuanced verbal stylings have made him one of the finest orators on the port side of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.
Related: “Sophie’s Choice for Democrats: to whom do we cut off the money (in an election year)?”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member