Recommended - Three weeks in and no one has Obama's back

I recommend Joan Vennochi’s piece “Three weeks in, and no one has Obama's back” in today’s Boston Globe. I think it summarizes fairly President Obama’s current problems.

Obama as a candidate was highly appealing, and I voted enthusiastically for him. He was smart, articulate, pragmatic, and offered a promise of change in Washington. But the nagging worry was always that despite his high promises he was too inexperienced to swim with the sharks in Washington. Washington is a tough place with lots of big, powerful sharks, and a lot of his opponents in both parties have been around for decades and know how to work the system. The battle over the stimulus package, in which Congress essentially ignored him and did their own pork-barrel thing just as they always have done, is not a promising start to his administration.

If he can’t regain control of the more extreme liberal elements in his own party, I think there is a fair chance he will be a one-term president. That would be a shame, because on other fronts he has done some smart things, and the team he has assembled looks promising. But this nation is almost 50% conservative (and many are not Republican), and if he lets his administration drift too far from the center, he will be in trouble, especially if the trillions of dollars dumped into stimulus and bailouts don’t have much visible effect on the economy within a year or two.