2/1: Performance Art

Health care reform may be "on life support", but the netroots received a nice morale boost from Pres. Obama's performance at the GOP House Issues Conference on Friday. Liberal bloggers think that Obama "very calmly and coolly dismantled" his interlocutors and "put the teleprompter joke to rest forever". One lefty blogger gushes: "I'd daresay this was Barack Obama's finest hour yet. Let's hope that there is more of this to come." Meanwhile, righty bloggers agree that Obama did well, although they also think that the House GOPers did themselves some good by "making it clear that they do, indeed, have ideas."

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Liberal bloggers (Beutler, Tim F., Dayen, Benen) are quite pessimistic about health care reform's prospects. Many lefty bloggers (Klein, Chait, digby, Black) are criticizing WH CoS Rahm Emanuel for suggesting that health care reform is no longer a top priority, but others (Krugman, Coates, Zasloff) are pointing out that Emanuel works for Obama, not the other way around.
• Conservative bloggers (Hoft, Erickson, McCain) continue to rally behind IL GOV candidate Adam Andrzejewski (R). Meanwhile, Daily Kos conducted interviews with IL SEN candidates Alexi Giannoulias (D) and David Hoffman (D). Liberal blogger Nate Silver argues that it's not clear whether Giannoulias or Hoffman is more electable.
• Liberal bloggers (bmaz, Serwer, digby) -- along with Andrew Sullivan -- are upset that an upcoming DoJ report has "clear[ed] the Bush administration lawyers who authored the 'torture' memos of professional-misconduct allegations." Conservative blogger John Hinderaker thinks the verdict is "good, I guess," but complains that "it is still an outrage that a lawyer who writes a memorandum arguing a legal position with which a subsequent administration disagrees can be threatened with disbarment."

OBAMA: A Painful Beatdown?

Liberal bloggers loved Obama's performance at the GOP House Issues Conference:

• Balloon Juice's John Cole: "For some reason, the GOP allowed the cameras to roll at their retreat during a question time session with President Obama, and he spent the next hour and a half depantsing them. Pretty funny stuff."
• Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: "It's remarkable that Republicans agreed to this. The guy at the mike always has an advantage in these kinds of forums, and in any case Obama is better than most at this kind of thing. For the most part, he's running rings around them. I don't know if this will have any long-term effect, but it's good for Obama and, regardless, a good show."
• Atrios: "I wonder who the idiot is who thought this format -- Republican idiots asking questions of Obama at a podium -- was a good idea. [We] might do well in [the] November elections after all."
• Think Progress' Matthew Yglesias: "[This] It was sort of like Prime Minister's Questions and it revealed, simply put, that Barack Obama is a lot smarter and better-informed than his antagonists. A lot. He very calmly and coolly dismantled them."
• Sadly, No!'s D. Aristophanes: "I don't want to be as nutty as the MSNBC crew in their praise of Obama's expedition into shitheel territory today, but really, he did very, very well. At they very least, he put the teleprompter joke to rest forever."
• BooMan: "I can honestly say that if as many Americans watched today's Q & A with the Republicans as watched the State of the Union, our political problems would be over. If we had Question Time, we'd have a much easier time winning over public opinion and sustaining support for progressive policies. The Republicans certainly will not want to repeat this extremely painful beat-down."
• The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Headline of the day -- 'Obama goes to GOP Lion's Den -- And Mauls The Lions.' Basically. That was an athletic display -- like watching [Bernard] Hopkins dominate [Felix] Trinidad back in the day. Or [Michael] Jordan drop 63 on the Celtics. (Let's not extend that metaphor too far, though. We know how that ends.) He's an immense, immense fucking talent. Now he needs to use that talent to deliver what he promised."
• The Reality-Based Community's Mark Kleiman: "[W]atching the entire House Republican Conference get taken to school by a guy they've convinced themselves is just an empty suit with a TelePrompter should make you feel sorry for them."
• Balloon Juice's DougJ: "Obama really is good at this stuff. It doesn't come across as staged (like it might have with [Al] Gore or [John] Kerry) or pissy (like it might with Democrats in Congress). It comes across as patient, sane adult talking to crazy children. Which is exactly what it is."
• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "Obama was impressive. He was on the offense and didn't back down. That's the President we need to see. He looked like a leader -- a very smart leader."
• MyDD's Charles Lemos: "I'd daresay this was Barack Obama's finest hour yet. Let's hope that there is more of this to come."

An exception was digby, who didn't think Obama helped himself with his performance: "I remain concerned that the message is not as clear to the rest of the country as his supporters think it was. ('Don't mess with Obama.') I watched [Bill] Clinton do this type of thing over and over again and it didn't change the dynamic at all. He was personally successful, but liberal ideology was degraded every time he conceded something like 'I think we raised taxes too much' or 'the era of big government is over.' People loved his ability to out talk his accusers (in his case it was a real high wire act) but the agenda suffered greatly from his ceaseless efforts to cajole a psychotically hostile opposition into working with him. It resulted in passage of center right policies and his own impeachment."

OBAMA II: Credit Where Credit's Due

Several conservative bloggers agreed with their liberal counterparts that Obama's performance was impressive:

• Power Line's Paul Mirengoff: "[This] was, as just about everyone agrees, an impressive performance by Obama, a performance that I think confirms my view that Obama remains very much a force to be reckoned with. Conservatives who think his extraordinary communications skills vanished with the end of the presidential campaign and that he may now be a spent force are deluding themselves, in my opinion."
• NRO's Jim Geraghty: "Like everyone else, I think this event did Obama a great deal of good; it was the antidote to everything that was insufferable about the State of the Union -- the uninterrupted platitudes, the dishonest framing, the aversion to acknowledging alternative views, the endless droning, etc."
• Hot Air's Allahpundit: "The GOP figured it'd give them a platform to prove that they actually do have policy ideas of their own, but I think the format ended up benefiting Obama more than them. He was on camera the whole time; he did most of the talking; he got to show that he's perfectly capable of extemporaneous debate even with multiple prepared challengers lobbing questions. (Which should have been clear after 20+ debates in 2008, but the TOTUS jokes have taken on a life of their own.) Even conservatives I follow on Twitter were saying that he seemed more appealing in this format than in his thousand speeches last year. Who knows? Maybe that means we'll see more of this."

On the other hand, AmSpec Blog's Quin Hillyer found Obama exceedingly unlikeable: "This President is an arrogant, thin-Skinned, prevaricator and I could tear him limb from limb (figuratively speaking) in a Q & A give-and-take. I am watching him act like a haughty, angry, self-righteous, self-reverential (insert appropriate noun) in his meeting with House Republicans right now, and he is lecturing them like they are teenagers. What an arrogant so-and-so. [...] His tone was utterly inappropriate, his body language even worse. That was not a polite give-and-take (although Republicans were certainly polite); it was a stern, rhetoric-filled, in-your-face lecture. He acts as if nobody ever has the right to question him seriously -- not only his are they not to question his motives, but his assumpions, his purity, his conclusions, and his own sense of his own exaltedness. This is a man with the soul of an authoritarian. And that is dangerous."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Pure Speculation

Balloon Juice's DougJ:

"It seems worth asking: what would Republicans do if they gained control of the House? Presumably, there would be a lot of absurd, numberless bubble-chart proposals, for sure, but I don't think anyone would pay much attention to them. My guess is that politically, the biggest thing would do is start lots of investigations. What do you think they would investigate? [Ex-WH Comm. Dir.] Anita Dunn and [ex-WH adviser] Van Jones, probably, but what else? Would they delve into Obama's pre-presidential years? Would they hold hearings on his birth certificate? Would they impeach him? Would the press go along with all of this the way they did with Whitewater and Travelgate and Socksgate? My gut feeling is that the answer to the last three questions is 'yes'."

LEST WE FORGET: Best Thing That Ever Happened To Area Man Yelling At Him About Socks

From The Onion:

"MINNEAPOLIS -- Joseph Collins, 38, who is perhaps the luckiest man alive and who certainly doesn't deserve the wonderful woman who showed him what it was like to be happy, was chastised by the love of his life for sock-related reasons Thursday. 'Look at the holes in these toes,' sighed Collins' perfect match, who found him when he was adrift in his late-20s and brought joy and tenderness into his life. 'And these are your good SmartWools. You have to treat your things right, honey. Are you listening to me?' At press time, Shelly Collins' knight in shining armor was spilling cookie crumbs all over the couch she had just cleaned."