Eleanor Clift: 'Part of Obama’s problem is that there’s too much hero worship around him'

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Eleanor Clift: 'Part of Obama’s problem is that there’s too much hero worship around him'

Eleanor Clift: 'Part of Obama’s problem is that there’s too much hero worship around him'
by John Aravosis
November 22, 2010

And the problem isn't just the hero worship of those surrounding Obama, there's been a concerted effort to shun anyone who is progressive. One glaring example: Stiglitz and Krugman, who just so happened to be right about the need for a larger stimulus. The hero worship is more conservative worship, and anyone who isn't a conservative Dem, or Republican, need not apply to the Obama court.

From Eleanor Clift at Newsweek:

Part of Obama’s problem is that there’s too much hero worship around him, and that translates into a reluctance to fault him for anything, except maybe that he didn’t make a good enough case for all the wonderful things he’s done. He has done good things, but the voters don’t give you credit for saving them from a depression; they reward you for making their lives better, and that hasn’t happened. The bankers on Wall Street are doing fine, but the other 80 percent of the country is hurting, and that’s not supposed to happen when a Democrat is in the White House.

In his post-election press conference, Obama said there must be easier ways to learn the hard lessons of politics than getting the shellacking he and the Democrats got. There are, and if his aides weren’t so in love with him and wrapped up in the idea of him as a transformational president, they might have seen this coming.

Though he’s portrayed as a liberal, it’s not clear what he’ll fight for, and he keeps that deliberately vague, perhaps hoping to deliver on the post-partisan promise his election represented. The fight over whether to extend Bush-era tax cuts is a perfect example. The White House needs to settle on a strategy and then execute it, whatever it is. Hope is not a strategy, and the extent to which Obama seems to weigh the political considerations of whatever decision he makes reinforces the voters’ disillusionment that rather than leading, he has instead become part of the government—an implicit admission of his failure to bring about the change he ran on.

What he needs are some hard-nosed policies to rescue the millions of homeowners who are underwater, plus a vision to revive the nation’s manufacturing base to begin the long and painful restoration of jobs. He needs people around him who make him uncomfortable, who challenge his world view, and who have a better understanding of the workings of Capitol Hill, however dysfunctional it has become. The people around Obama caught the lightning in ’08, but they’ve been outmaneuvered by a party that two years ago was on the brink of extinction.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/19/the-problem-with-the-cult-of-obama.html

http://www.americablog.com/2010/11/eleanor-clift-part-of-obamas-problem-is.html