1/26: A Frosty Relationship

It took George W. Bush six years to alienate his base, but if the current mood of the netroots is any indication, Pres. Obama has done it in less than one. Liberal bloggers are up in arms over Obama's proposed three-year freeze in domestic spending. Paul Krugman calls the proposal "appalling on every level" while Paul Rosenberg thinks "it's time to seriously start talking about primarying Obama in 2012." Most lefty bloggers aren't quite ready to primary Obama, but they're still extremely critical of what they perceive to be a terrible move in both political and policy terms. Progressives are particularly upset that Obama has "fully embrace[d] the conservative narrative" about spending and deficits. On this latter point, conservatives agree -- Jim Geraghty thinks that Obama has made "a huge rhetorical concession" with this proposal.

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Most liberal bloggers (Kleiman, Tim F., Drum, Waldman, McCarter) see only one possible path for health care reform: (1.) House Dems must pass the Senate bill, and (2.) Senate Dems must return the favor by passing House-friendly amendments using the reconciliation process. Andrew Sullivan (1, 2, 3, 4) is also aggressively pushing House Dems to pass the Senate bill. However, Firedoglake continues to lobby House Dems against the Senate bill -- to the dismay of others on the left.
• Several liberal bloggers (Moulitsas, DougJ, Cole, BooMan, Drum) are having a meta discussion about the frayed relationship between Obama and his base.
• Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas continues to urge AR LG Bill Halter (D) to challenge Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), since he believes that Lincoln has no chance at beating a GOPer in the fall. Meanwhile, MyDD's Jerome Armstrong wants Dems to field a solid candidate in AZ, since "if [ex-Rep.] J.D. Hayworth defeats [Sen.] John McCain, this seat is up for a toss-up in the GE -- if Dems have a good candidate."
• Conservative bloggers (Erickson, Morrissey, Geraghty, Bandes) are excited about the new Quinnipiac Univ. poll showing ex-state House Speaker Marco Rubio (R) surging ahead of Gov. Charlie Crist (R) in the FL SEN GOP primary.

OBAMA: Kicking His Base In The Teeth

Liberal bloggers are blasting Obama's proposed three-year spending freeze:

• Atrios: "We are ruled by idiots."
• Open Left's Rosenberg: "It's official: Obama is an idiot. [...] It's time to seriously start talking about primarying Obama in 2012. He's now officially the most conservative Democratic President since Grover Cleveland. And the dumbest one since James Buchanan."
• MyDD's desmoinesdem: "Please tell me our president is smarter than this. [...] It's as if he wants Democrats to stay home this November."
• The Reality-Based Community's Jonathan Zasloff: "I'm trying to think of what could possibly be a worse plan. Let's see: we might be entering a double-dip recession and unemployment is in double-digits, and you are going to freeze spending? What in God's name are they thinking? [...] Why exactly did I give money and make calls for this guy in 2008?"
• The New York Times' Krugman: "A spending freeze? That's the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback? It's appalling on every level. It's bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. [...] It's bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead. And it's a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view -- and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008."
• Open Left's David Sirota: "This is actually worse -- way worse -- than John McCain's campaign proposal for across-the-board cuts, as across-the-board cuts would have hit the massive and bloated Pentagon budget. Instead, the Obama administration is specifically and exclusively targeting social safety-net spending for a budget freeze (read: cut in real, inflation-adjusted dollars)."
• digby: "It's been my biggest complaint about Obama from the beginning. They always do this 'one from column A and one from column B' thinking they can please everyone. But to sound tough on bankers and then enact a spending freeze (on 'non-security' spending, natch) is too clever by half. Combined with the deficit fetishism, it will tie his hands at the time he needs the most flexibility on jobs --- and further destroy liberalism in the process."
• Firedoglake's David Dayen: "Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he'll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs. And of course, the truly unbelievable thing about this is how it's framed as non-security discretionary spending, as if spending on the military is magic and somehow doesn't affect budgets."

OBAMA II: A Stupid, Pointless Move

Even liberal bloggers who perceive Obama's three-year spending freeze as a gimmick rather than a serious proposal are disgusted by the move:

• Daily Kos' Jed Lewison: "[T]he proposed freeze is narrower in scope than I had feared, so it probably won't be a disaster for the economy. But in the sense that the freeze apparently won't be much of a freeze, it seems that the plan may end looking like a major political gimmick."
• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "[T]his feels like a gimmick to me. It's a gimmick that won't please key constituencies or the base. It sure won't endear Obama to Republicans."
• TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat: "The policy problem with the Obama Administration's silly political gimmick -- the spending freeze -- is that it basically accepts the idea that there is an immediate need to cut government spending when in fact there still remains an urgent need to increase government spending to spur our stagnant economy. If we were to treat the proposal seriously, and the Village will, then the Obama administration has completely undermined the chances for effective policy to address our economic woes."
• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "So, if the proposal isn't really going to change much, why is this disappointing? Because it fully embraces the conservative narrative, instead of using the power of the bully pulpit to explain why conservatives have it wrong. It may be even worse as a policy matter -- we just don't have enough details to say -- but that's distressing enough."
• TAPPED's Tim Fernholz: "Given the low likelihood that all of these cuts get passed in Congress or that Republicans even sign on to this plan, and the fact that it really isn't a 'freeze,' the problem is less in policy and more in the incredibly pernicious political argument: Obama is accepting the conservative budget framing that progressives fought against during his campaign by focusing deficit reduction on the most underfunded chunk of the budget, exempting the Defense Department from responsibility, and leaving revenue off the table (it's no coincidence, however, that 2011 is when some of the Bush tax cuts will roll back). It's exactly what progressive budget experts said not to do."
• Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: "The liberal base now has yet another reason to be disgusted with Obama, so the obvious hope is that independents are going to lap this up. And who knows? Maybe they will. But what I wonder is this: hasn't Obama's pivot happened too quickly to seem like anything other than what it increasingly is: a panicky and transparent attempt to recover from the Massachusetts tsunami? Given that, is anyone going to buy it? Or is it just going to come across as a thinly veiled and poll approved effort to 'connect' with voter angst without really doing anything substantive?"
• FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver: "First reactions aren't always the best ones, but my first reaction to tonight's news is that it's a mistake on par with John McCain's 'suspending my campaign' gaffe. [...] I'll let the economists talk about the wisdom of curtailing government spending in the middle of a massive consumption deficit, but what concerns me more is the politics. Specifically, the sort of cognitive dissonance that is going to be created in the mind of the average voter when the White House is promising to freeze spending on the one hand (or, more accurately, this will be the media caricature of their gambit), and on the other, trying to defend its stimulus and its health care reform package, trying to excuse the bailout package as a necessary evil, and perhaps trying to champion new programs."

Think Progress' Matthew Yglesias: "Suffice it to say that I'm very skeptical of this approach. I'm attempting not to freak out because (a) I don't have details and (b) I suspect this initiative was deliberately leaked to progressive bloggers in an effort to get denounced by the left and I don't want to give them the satisfaction."

OBAMA III: Everyone Chill Out!

A few liberal bloggers think their colleagues of making too big of a deal about Obama's proposed spending freeze:

• BooMan: "This stupid spending freeze is peanuts that won't mean anything in the larger picture. Congress probably won't go along with it anyway. [...] The best I can say for this bit of triangulation is that it polls well and it doesn't mean anything. The fiscal problems in Washington are endemic and unsolvable in our present system, and pretending the amount of money we're talking about here is even a drop in the bucket is just silly."
• The Reality-Based Community's Mark Kleiman: "A spending freeze is a stupid idea. Fortunately, as far as I can tell, Barack Obama does not in tend to propose one. He's proposing an overall budget cap on discretionary non-security spending, but intends to move money around within that cap. If he'd called it 'cut and invest,' there wouldn't be quite such howls of outrage. I'm still not happy; the notion that 'security' is a different, sacrosanct budget makes no sense, and I'd like to see the federal government doing more in lots of discretionary non-security areas, starting with a bigger NSF budget. But there's less here than meets the eye. And it's hard to see how Obama could have convincingly gone after some sacred cows without announcing a hard budget constraint. We'll know more when we see the actual budget, but right now I see no reason for despair. Who knows? We might see some cuts in farm subsidies and NASA."

Oliver Willis is particularly critical of his netroots colleagues: "One of the problems I've always feared is that should we elect a Democratic president in this country, he or she might face a domestic handicap among that most unlikely of sources: liberals. Sadly, I'm turning out to be right, and today's collective pants-wetting on both liberal blogs and on Twitter has been a sight to behold."

OBAMA IV: All Hat And No Cattle

Most conservative bloggers are portraying Obama's proposed spending freeze as a superficial gesture:

• Glenn Reynolds: "[This is] like swearing off the bottle when you're hung over."
• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "This freeze is nothing more than a political shell game. Democrats increased spending by $900 billion over three years, and now they plan to freeze 13% of a budget while leaving massive loopholes for more social engineering that has utterly failed in 2009, while taking credit for being fiscally responsible. It's laughably transparent, but not in the good sense."
• RedState's bs: "To propose a spending freeze of any sort is good political theater for Obama, but it will have virtually no impact on the financial standing of the United States of America."
• NRO's Denis Boyles: "[This is] a great example of a 'solution' that solves nothing, something European politicians have refined to an art."
• Michelle Malkin: "The ballyhooed budget spending freeze that will be a feature of the State of the Union address tomorrow doesn't cover behemoth entitlement programs. It doesn't cover a second stimulus. It is limited to an electorally-timed three-year period. The White House is already promising that favored left-wing programs in education and the environment would get a pass."

Many righty bloggers (Reynolds, Jessup, Foster) are pointing out that Obama criticized McCain's advocacy of spending freezes during the WH '08 campaign.

OBAMA V: Score One For The Right

A few conservative bloggers are giving Obama mild plaudits for the move, even though they doubt it will have much of an effect on the deficit:

• Hot Air's Allahpundit: "Granted, this is a cynical political move that he almost certainly wouldn't have made if not for his collapsing support among independents, but even a cosmetic gesture deserves a golf clap, no?"
• AmSpec Blog's Philip Klein: "My position is, yes, this is mainly a symbolic gesture -- after all, the White House claims it would save $250 billion -- less than a third of the cost of the economic stimulus bill alone. It's only a temporary, three-year freeze that follows years of unprecedented spending and it comes as he's pitching a jobs bill, which is essentially a second stimulus. [...] But with that said, I think this is a good issue for conservatives -- and also Republicans -- to get behind rather than just reflexively oppose. Point out why it's mainly cosmetic and doesn't go far enough, say 'I see you, and I raise you,' but still jump on any chance to reduce the growth in federal spending, however marginal."

Meanwhile, NRO's Geraghty thinks Obama is making "a huge rhetorical concession": "[W]e've gotten a man who campaigned on expanding government to concede that his vision is not affordable. This is an enormous opportunity for those who want to see a smaller, more focused government. For starters, any Democrat who opposes the spending freeze can now be justifiably painted as reckless, out of control, unserious about budget matters, and a threat to the nation's long-term economic future. 'Even President Obama says we have to freeze spending now. Why is Congressman So-and-so calling for even more spending that we can't afford?' There is enormous potential to drive a deep wedge between Obama and a large part of the Democratic caucus. Second, by making this proposal, Obama is conceding a large portion of the terms of the debate. For all extents and purposes, spending increases are now off the table."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The Death Of Liberalism?

Geraghty analyzes the left's angry reaction to Obama's proposed spending freeze:

"If Obama can be forced into becoming a rhetorical deficit hawk, and if the fundamental message of his second year in office is 'less spending good, more spending bad,' we may see the spirit of modern liberalism broken. They've already seen that even with 60 votes in the Senate and about 257 in the House, the public option isn't going to happen and now it's not clear that health reform will happen at all. Now Barack Obama -- their messiah, their ideal, their embodiment of hope and change -- is sending more troops to Afghanistan and calling for a spending freeze.

Liberals will never get a better opportunity to enact their agenda than they are getting in 2009 and 2010, and so far they've gotten the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and a reduction to a mere 107,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

If liberals come to November 2010 and realize that very little has changed, and that all of their efforts in the past few years have been for naught, then a not-insignificant number may decide that all of this is a waste of time, that the American political system is unfixable, and they'll find some other way to occupy their time."

LEST WE FORGET: Man Who Enjoys Thing Informed He Is Wrong

From The Onion:

"LOS ANGELES -- George Himmelsbaugh, 32, was informed Tuesday that he was incorrect in enjoying a thing he had been deriving pleasure from for many years. Authorities in the field informed Himmelsbaugh that, although he believes his appreciation of the thing to be a matter of subjective personal taste, any positive feelings or satisfaction taken from this are by definition erroneous. Furthermore, sources reported, Himmelsbaugh does not in fact enjoy the thing, but has merely been convinced that he does by the influence of others who also claim to enjoy the thing but who must be insane or developmentally disabled if they actually do. Himmelsbaugh has responded to the information by endeavoring to enjoy the correct things in the future."