Not Liking It One Bit

Whne Jim Carville starts calling for Treasury Secretary Geithner's job, perhaps Dem strategists should listen.  And maybe there's a grain of truth people should recognize in this statement by Chris Lehane...

With Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, says Chris Lehane, a veteran of the Clinton White House, "people got what they were about. People knew what Reagan stood for, people knew what Clinton stood for. The big challenge for this particular president is, what is our party's theory of the case?"


Obama, Lehane says, "ran an aspirational campaign that was about him and the idea of him. But there wasn't a specific theory of where he was going to take the country. If you were a centrist, if you were a progressive, you projected that he was the kind of president you wanted."

Bingo -- that last point nailed it.

As far back as 2007, I told friends on both sides of the aisle that Obama would win the election easily if he won the primary, and that the Dems would be smart to nominate him if they wanted to win. By the time he got the nomination, I had an additional point -- that there was no way he could succeed as President. The coalition he assembled was too diverse, particulary when it came to ideology. Too many people looked at Barack Obama and saw what they wanted him to be politically, rather than what he was. Many of those folks now see what he is politically, and it's very different. And they don't like it.