Rubin demurs and suggests instead that the excitement over the revivification of Mr. Obama's political career is either phony, misplaced, or premature. She maintains that there is no "comeback":
[I]f the highlight of Obama's term, according to outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was the "historic" ObamaCare legislation, then the highlight could soon be extinguished. Obama's central domestic achievement is facing judicial scrutiny, a Republican onslaught to repeal, or at least defund, it, and a public that has never "learned" to love the bill.I particularly like the sentence that says that the left-leaning media confuse legislative achievement with political success. They also confuse legislative action with national progress. Turn on almost any program at MSNBC and the talk is all about how great it is that the Democrats won on DADT and START. It's like watching a sports talk show. It's all about whether one's own side wins. There's rarely any discussion of what these things will actually mean for the country and whether we'll be better off once they're passed.
Only inside the Beltway could the passage of an arms control treaty and repeal of DADT consume so many for so long and result in such exaggerated punditry. Would Republicans have traded wins on DADT and START for their wins on the DREAM act, the tax deal and the omnibus spending bill? Not in a million years.
But liberal media mavens have a narrative that resists "bad news" (i.e. scandals, polling, the Tea Party movement) which suggests trouble for the Obama administration. They also confuse legislative achievement with political success. If passing stuff was the secret to a political comeback, then the Democrats after ObamaCare and the stimulus plan would have had the greatest year ever [at the polls].
Obama may yet stage a comeback. But to do that, he'll have to do what the left loathes -- cut domestic programs, rework entitlement programs, stand up to foreign adversaries (Obama's legacy is irretrievably ruined if Iran gets the bomb on his watch), cut back on growth-restricting regulations and keep tax rates low. And so long as unemployment remains at historic highs, Obama's chances of re-election remain poor.
You'd think, watching the commentary on MSNBC, that what's actually in these measures and what their consequences will be is totally irrelevant. How many newspapers have actually walked their readers through the provisions of the START treaty and pointed out what the proponents like and the opponents don't, and why? I suppose some have, but most news outlets spent their time during the lame-duck session chattering about the political alignments and who among the Republicans Mr. Obama might win over to his side to get the treaty passed. Then, once it passed, they reported on this as a great victory for the President with little or no explanation why we should think that it was a great victory for the country.
The television talking heads also prattle a lot about Obama's "move to the center", as if this were a brilliant stratagem. I've heard almost no one talk about what it says for a man's principles if he campaigns on the left (or right), but then moves to the middle once elected in order to improve his chances of reelection. If Mr. Obama abandons his core convictions to compromise with the Republicans the country will be better off than had he not, but Mr. Obama will be shown to have been nothing more, politically speaking, than John McCain without McCain's experience. So what was the point of all the sturm und drang in 2008? What did all the rhetoric about a coming transformational presidency actually mean?
It would seem that it meant that the electorate had been snookered into believing that they were getting something novel in our politics when, in fact, they were getting the same old thing.