Elizabeth Drew Tries to Put Lipstick on a Pig

Here's Elizabeth Drew trying her damnedest to blame Republicans for the current disaster that is the Obama administration at year six.

At the New York Review of Books, "Obama & the Coming Election":

Obama did much to pull the country out of the deep recession he inherited, including a rescue of the automobile industry, but a lot of people still don’t benefit from the improved economy, or have dropped out of the labor market, or have been forced into part-time jobs and lower wages.

No doubt it would have been beneficial if more money had been approved for rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, but the votes in Congress weren’t there, just as they weren’t for a single-payer health system, and no amount of presidential rhetoric or arm-twisting—about which there is a fair amount of mythology—would have made a difference.

Obama’s one great disappointment was the failure to win comprehensive immigration reform. After the 2012 election the Republicans were panicking that if they didn’t back immigration reform, Hispanics would punish them mightily in 2016. But then they panicked that if they did back it, Tea Party candidates would upset them in their primaries in 2014.

It’s been evident for quite a while that a certain chilliness on Obama’s part has affected his relations with Congress, but it’s also questionable how much substantive difference this has made. A Cabinet officer said to me, “He’s a loner, and one result is that few Democrats are willing to take the hill for him.” Obama rose swiftly in politics and essentially on his own—he’d been on his own for most of his life—and political camaraderie is of little interest to him. His golfing foursomes are most often made up of junior White House staff and close nonpolitical friends from Chicago. This might not make much difference in the number of bills passed but it has had one very serious effect on his presidency: the Democrats’ unwillingness to praise, defend, much less celebrate the president has left the field clear to his multitude of attackers.

Obama tended to proceed on the theory that if he made some concessions to the Republicans—say, by speeding up deportations of undocumented immigrants—they might be more cooperative; but this hasn’t worked out. It’s true that he is innately cautious, and it’s also true that it is a lot easier to declare what he should have done than to show how he could actually have gotten the votes for that. Little is as simple in the Oval Office as it is to outside critics...

Hmm. Ms. Drew's still in the early stages of grief at the utter collapse of the Great Promise of American Politics, Barack Hussein Obama, who was supposed to be accompanied by unicorns and rainbows.

More at the link.