Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics [hurl til you drop]

Newsweek ^ | 1/16/12 | Andrew Sullivan

[NativeNewYorker]

...given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

[NativeNewYorker]

A long piece providing talking points for the self-described "sane left".

[preamble]

Obama stinks at politics actually

stinks, the debt-ceiling, couldn’t let Bush tax cuts expire for high earners

but he is interested in his re-election campaign because by being
re-elected he makes his Obamacare and Dodd-Frank CFPB
communist fascist laws very unlikely repealed

Thus he will have “fundamentally tranformed America” just like he
said 5 days from 2008 election.

Just by being re-elected he will have done that.

That’s his long game.

[FrankR]

[Yardstick]

Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

This is an interesting statistic. I wonder how much of the 2.6% was due to a drop in military personnel related to the drawdown in Iraq.

[dfwgator]

Anyone can outsmart the GOP these days.

[NativeNewYorker]

It may also include the once-a-decade census. And of course it is a headcount measure, not a size of payroll measure.

[Prokopton]

Thus he will have “fundamentally tranformed America” just like he said 5 days from 2008 election. Just by being re-elected he will have done that.

He has already accomplished that. America has already been impoverished and saddled with insurmountable debt. There is no viable path out. Our healthcare has been socialized our banks and corporations taken over. The only devastation that Obama has not been successful at is amnesty, and if a Republican is elected president, that too will likely pass.

[andy58-in-nh]

State and local government employment is down, largely due to a response to years of unsupportable expansion and underfunded pension obligations. Federal employees, exclusive of the military and the failing US postal service are not shrinking significantly in number, and that number is expected to grow by 10% during the next ten years, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Source: http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs041.htm#emply

[y6162]

Sullivan opened himself to critique by real economists.

The left thinks the “narrative” is all that counts. Not reality.

[RichInOC]

Andrew, “everybody’s crazy but Barry and me” is a particularly poor argument when the “me” in question is, well, you.