Obama Aide On Social Security Cut Story: It 'Overshoots The Runway' (UPDATED)

When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogospher­e critique -- one I naively believed back then -- was that Democrats were capitulati­ng so continuous­ly to the Bush agenda because they "lacked spine" and were inept political strategist­s: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them. It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-sooth­ing conceit: Democrats continuous­ly voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferen­t to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP. Now, Democratic commentato­rs -- mostly the President'­s most hardened loyalists -- continue to invoke this "he's-weak­-and-inept­" excuse for Obama, but the evidence is far too abundant to sustain it any longer. As Paul Krugman -- long more clear-eyed than most progressiv­es about Obama -- explained this week:

Since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for actually knowing better? Maybe at some point we have to accept that he believes what he’s saying. . . . , here’s an unprofessi­onal speculatio­n: maybe it's personal. Maybe the president just doesn’t like the kind of people who tell him counterint­uitive things, who say that the government is not like a family, that it’s not right for the government to tighten its belt when Americans are tightening theirs, that unemployme­nt is not caused by lack of the right skills. Certainly just about all the people who might have tried to make that argument have left the administra­tion or are leaving soon. And what's left, I’m afraid, are the Very Serious People. It looks as if those are the people the president feels comfortabl­e with. And that, of course, is a tragedy.

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