Yes, Obama "negotiated with himself" when he proposed his stimulus plan in early ‘09. It would have taken a bolder, stronger president to do any less. My view is that he, and his aides, are in love with his popularity and were trying to ride it out as long as possible. Thus, middle ground choices on almost everything. The really believed they could bring the country together around his personality and vision.

Yes, Obama's and the Dems push back was amazingly weak, unfocused and diffuse. Apparently, the Obama staff does not remember or understand the messages of 1992 and '94: the Republicans are determined to kill off any Democratic administration before it can settle in or even catch its breath. They believe no Democrat should ever be in the White House, that all such leaders are illegitimate and should be seen as such by the American people. So, in a careful, coordinated and coldly calculated way, they set about to destroy Obama and, lately, he's been helping them by publicly volunteering to eat humble pie on national television. How nice. For them.

There is one characteristic Americans will never tolerate in their president and that is weakness. They want a person who is as big and strong as the job at hand. Back peddling and fumbling around should never be on the menu. Putting the president out for a televised news conference hours after a Republican election victory should never even be considered, unless he has a strong, new initiative to announce. (Bush fired his Defense Secretary the day after the Republicans lost the House in '06, which immediately changed the focus of news coverage. It might have been seen as both bold and reckless, but it worked.)

Let's not blame everything, however, on this president and his people and party. We are seeing the emergence of a new type of endless campaign in America. It has, literally, been developed since the age of propaganda began during world war one. The techniques are old, the tactics are new. Several hundred million dollars have been spent to defeat this president while in office, and that doesn't even count the propaganda machines like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh attacking day by day, hour by hour, raising doubts, questions and fears in the mind of the public.

Propaganda does not have to be fully accepted to be damaging. It is often enough to develop doubts in the minds of the willing. Plant a little seed in the minds of the public and watch it grow. Then, those doubts can be confirmed, or appear to be confirmed, and expanded over time. In terms of Obama’s birthplace and religion, the fact that it gets repeated again and again serves as a kind false confirmation for some people.

At present, we have seen only the tip of the iceberg about this campaign. We know that cameras were sent around to harass incumbent Dems in Congress with embarrassing questions and that one of those harassment events turned into a shouting event with a Congressman. The "cameraman", it turned out, was a hired college student loyal to the Republican cause. There were many other Republican cameramen as well.

We also know that the Tea Party groups came up too fast and too strong to be entirely self generated. They have every appearance of being a Republican planned and planted operation, including the active involvement of Republicans like former Congressman Dick Armey and former White House operative Karl Rove. (Which is not to say that all of the Tea Party people are insincere. Most however, do appear to be politically inexperienced, to say the least.)

In short, neither the Dems nor the general public really know the full scope of what hit Obama. He is being out maneuvered on every front and his response is to talk about compromise and cooperation, which are about as likely as Elvis showing up for a concert at the KennedyCenter. We need the cold, hard facts about the Republican campaign to destroy this presidency. Fighting, hard, to win an election is one thing. People accept rough tactics. Fighting to destroy the viability of a president elected by the nation is something far different.

More than three decades ago, Richard Nixon plotted to continue and increase his power by using illegal and       un-Constitutional tactics. He probably would have gotten away with most of it, had he not turned to actual, crude violations of the law like break-ins and bribery. Until we know the full picture of the effort to destroy Obama, we should reserve some of our more harsh judgments about him as a president.

Doug Terry 11.15.10

PAUL KRUGMAN, in the NY Times:

Right at the beginning of his administration, what Mr. Obama needed to do, above all, was fight for an economic plan commensurate with the scale of the crisis. Instead, he negotiated with himself before he ever got around to negotiating with Congress, proposing a plan that was clearly, grossly inadequate, then allowed that plan to be scaled back even further without protest. And the failure to act forcefully on the economy, more than anything else, accounts for the midterm “shellacking”.