[My take is between the brackets.]

Obama Pushes an Agenda Without Keeping an Eye on Disapproving Polls
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Published: July 16, 2010
WASHINGTON - If passage of the financial regulatory overhaul on Thursday proves anything about President Obama, it is this: He knows how to push big bills through a balky Congress. [especially if they are essentially meaningless or yet another gift to corporations.]

But Mr. Obama's legislative success poses a paradox: while he may be winning on Capitol Hill, he is losing with voters [see comment above] at a time of economic distress, and soon may be forced to scale back his ambitions. [Hard to know what ambitions Stolberg thinks he needs to reduce. He has no apparent ambitions to help Americans outside the Beltway, the MIC and Wall Street.]

The financial regulatory bill is the final piece of a legislative hat trick [three tries, three resounding rip offs of the public] that also included the stimulus bill and the landmark new health care law. Over the last 18 months, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have made considerable inroads in passing what could be the most ambitious agenda in decades. [Now that ambition has been redefined as passing anything at all.]

Mr. Obama has done what he promised when he ran for office in 2008: he has used government as an instrument to try to narrow the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. [As long as narrowing the gap is defined cosmetically, not literally.] He has injected $787 billion in tax dollars into the economy [as opposed to the $14 trillion he and Congress gave to the financial industry], provided health coverage to 32 million uninsured [almost entirely in name only, since people will have the policy but won't be able to afford the fees & co-pays, there being no cost controls in the bill] and now, reordered the relationship among Washington, Wall Street, investors and consumers. [at least, & probably at most, in name only.]

But as he has done so, the political context has changed around him. Today, with unemployment remaining persistently near double digits despite [because of] the scale of the stimulus program and the BP oil spill having raised questions about his administration's competence [and honesty], Mr. Obama's signature legislation is providing ammunition to conservatives who argue that government is the problem, not the solution. [possibly because he's following in Republican footsteps]

What Mr. Obama and his allies portray as progressive, activist government has been framed by his opponents as overreaching and profligate when it comes to the economy. [They're both lying.]

Even before the November elections, the White House is being forced to recalibrate [like the health care plan, this means doing exactly what he wanted to do in the first place.] This week, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats decided to press ahead with a scaled-back energy bill, having concluded after months of gridlock that the sweeping measure they once envisioned simply would not pass. It is a tactic that the president will likely have to employ more and more [since he's unwilling to propose & explain real progressive policies] after the November elections, when Democrats will almost certainly lose seats - and may even lose control of the House or Senate. [because they are unwilling to give voters what we have clearly wanted: Medicare for all; an end to the wars; stopping the redistribution of wealth to the wealthy; jobs; foreclosure protection; the rule of law]

"They clearly made a decision that political capital was something that should be used, not saved," said Steven Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who worked for years as a senior leadership aide on Capitol Hill. "The reality is, he talked before the election about what he wanted to do, and he's done it. He didn't trim his sails, he didn't change his philosophy. He didn't compromise. The test will come in the fall: can he and Democrats in Congress make the case to the American people that what he did was the right thing to do?" [this guy wouldn't know outside-the-beltway reality if it hit him in the face (& I wish it would).]

That is a difficult case to make, though Mr. Obama is trying. [cf. hallucination] The latest CBS News poll found that while a majority of Americans supported increasing regulations on banks and financial institutions, nearly three-quarters said Mr. Obama's stimulus bill had not improved the economy [they might feel that way because it was less than a third the size it needed to be], and only a little more than a third approved of the health care law [and that is a larger number of people than it would actually help].

You know, sometimes these pundits, they can't figure me out," the president said last week, campaigning in Kansas City, Mo., for the Democratic Senate candidate there. "They say, 'Well, why is he doing that?' That doesn't poll well. Well, I've got my own pollsters, I know it doesn't poll well. But it's the right thing to do for America." [Especially if, by America, you mean the rich.]

It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, made to justify an unpopular war in Iraq as he watched his own poll numbers sink lower. Mr. Bush and his aides often felt they could not catch a break [and for equally good reasons]; when the economy was humming along - or at least seemed to be humming along - the Bush White House never got credit for it, because the public was so upset about the war [and because the economy was only humming for the rich].

In Mr. Obama's case, people are up in arms over the economy. Just 40 percent of Americans now approve of Mr. Obama's handling of the economy, the CBS News poll found. More than half said he was spending too little time on the economy. In one of the most striking findings, nearly two-thirds said the president's economic policies had no effect on them personally - just 13 percent said they had helped them. [I wonder what Obama's "polls" show, seeing as his policies are designed so that they won't help most folks.]

Voters don't have a checklist that they tick off, of what an elected official promised and then delivered," said Charlie Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter that tracks Congressional races. "They were enormously frustrated last year by the fixation on health care when they wanted a focus on the economy, with Democrats losing the messaging fight on whether what they did was right and effective or not."
[Since Americans wanted real health care reform and Obama, from the beginning, promised he wouldn't provide it—and delivered—it wasn't the “fixation on health care” that frustrated us, but the lack of fixation on universal, single payer health care that was frustrating.]

Part of the problem for Mr. Obama is that he came to Washington vowing to change the partisan tone in the capital, something he has thus far been unable to do. [If reporter Stolberg thinks that's the problem, get her on the clue train. No one except Obama gives a crap about partisanship. We want employment, affordable health care, and an end to the wars, etc.] Just three Senate Republicans voted for the financial regulatory bill on Thursday, continuing a pattern that began early in Mr. Obama's presidency when just three Republicans joined him on the stimulus bill.

At this point, relations between the president and the opposing party are no better than they were when Mr. Bush left office. Within hours of the bill's passage on Thursday, Democrats including Mr. Obama were reminding voters that the House Republican leader, Representative John Boehner of Ohio, had called for its repeal. As Mr. Obama traveled to Michigan on Thursday to promote his economic policies, Mr. Boehner accused him of "a bunch of fuzzy math."

If Republicans reclaim control of the House, the Senate or both, Mr. Obama will find himself in a situation similar to that of the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who lost control of the House in 1994 in a historic realignment. Mr. Clinton responded by steering toward the center, searching for issues on which he could find Republicans to cooperate.
[Clinton didn't go to the center, he went further to the right. This will be true for Obama, as well.]

If Mr. Obama's new tack on the energy bill is any guide, he may be willing to refashion himself as a pragmatist who will compromise in exchange for smaller victories. [I thought the MSM take on Obama was that he IS a pragmatist (what ever the hell that's supposed to mean.) Not to mention, if he “compromises” any more he'll have to re-register as a Republic and cut the pretense.] The coming elections may answer the question of how far the president, having had a taste of big things, is willing to bend. [If Obama bends any farther, he'll be committing a whole new level of self abuse.]

"It could be a prescription for real gridlock, or it could be a prescription for great compromise," said John Feehery, a Republican strategist, "and I don't think we know the answer."
[This, too, is nonsense. Any further compromise will have nothing to do with greatness, and there is real gridlock already.]