If you enjoyed Jonah Goldberg’s response to the notion of “putting partisan politics aside” during debates about public policy, you might appreciate the following excerpts from a new TIME article about President Obama’s approach to his re-election bid.
Early in the piece, Michael Scherer offers this gem:
The no-drama Commander in Chief, with his nearly visceral distaste for the phony theatrics of partisan warfare, will have to step out of his comfort zone.
With no apparent sense of irony, Scherer’s next paragraph reads as follows:
Meanwhile, after casting himself as the only reasonable man in an unreasonable town, Obama will try to divert the public’s frustration with Washington toward his main enemy, the GOP. “If people insist on playing ideological politics, catering to their base, putting their party politics ahead of the country, we are going to make them pay for that,” says David Plouffe, Obama’s top message strategist at the White House. “Because the American people can’t abide that kind of behavior in this economic situation. They have had it up to here.”
Once you’ve tried to square those two quotations, you might want to revisit William Kristol’s assessment of the Obama strategy.
