THE DEMOCRATS TURN ON OBAMA:

The rising stars of the Democratic Party have been airing criticisms of President Obama lately, covering them with only the thinnest of veils. . . .

Obama is truly the great uniter. First he united the Arabs and Israelis in a repudiation of his Middle East policies, now he’s united Republicans and Democrats in a repudiation of his policies at home. Almost everywhere you look, the gap between Obama’s stirring rhetoric and his underwhelming accomplishments is immense. One of the biggest failures was his inability to make the Democrats competitive in every state.

This stems from many things, but one is his apparent indifference to state government. He seems to think of the Federal government as the only level of government that really matters. It is especially telling that he has been missing in action while his home state of Illinois drifted into a state of advanced decay due to a worsening pension problem. Ditto his home city of Chicago, where racial polarization and financial decline have proceeded while the Obama White House was largely uninvolved. Great U.S. Presidents, and even good ones, are usually rooted in local politics. They are citizens of real places, and they carry the concerns and the insights of those places into office. Obama was a member of the New York Times tribe, people for whom an absence of local loyalties is a sign of enlightenment.

Plus: “President Obama will no doubt have a lucrative and high-profile retirement. He’s younger than most Presidents, and he will be staying in Washington for the time being. But his immediate legacy is clearly a disaster for Democrats: in early 2017, the Party will control a minority of state houses and no branch of Federal government. With so little, it’s very difficult to regenerate and develop a farm system. The Democrats’ bench is already extremely shallow; it probably won’t get much more crowded over the next few years.”

As evidenced by the fact that Keith Ellison and Tom Perez count as “rising stars.”