From The Times of London July 25, 2009 No Excuses! No Excuses! President Obama’s worst week so far may reveal his party’s poverty of ideas The incident itself sounds like the invention of a scriptwriter. Take the first black American president and give him an inspiring ascent to the White House in which he brilliantly unites the nation in his address on race, one of the most sophisticated speeches in modern politics. Cut, a few months later, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a black professor is arrested after trying to break into his own home. Then imagine that the man in question, just to intensify the force of the allegory, was the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Cut back to the White House and the President enlivens a dull press conference by claiming that the police acted “stupidly”. Cue splutter and outrage across the networks and the instant jury of the bloggers. Barack Obama originally changed the tone of the discourse on racial origin in America by a brilliant leap of logic. With great rhetorical flair, he avoided excuses and assumed innocence on the question of prejudice. In that spirit, on July 17 he delivered a sermon at the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in which he warned black parents to take their responsibilities seriously and told black children that growing up poor is no reason to get bad grades. In a characteristically resonant phrase he encapsulated his own recasting of the debate: “No one has written your destiny for you ... No excuses! No excuses!” President Obama has by no means undone all this good work with one ill-conceived remark. But for a politician as adept as he is,…

 The two big mistakesMichael TomaskyComments (90) I do think there are two tactical errors the White House made with regard to healthcare. There may be more. But these are the two that matter. And these are beyond doing it this year, which I've said many times I was against.
 
First -- I've said this too, come to think of it -- not enough emphasis was placed on the moral case for changing the status quo. Obama placed emphasis on cost savings. One understands why, I guess, given the state of the economy right now (although this circles back to my main argument that they should have waited until the economy was better). But the problem with the p.r. campaign was that they didn't show how this would change many peoples' lives for the better. Now, lots of us are asserting that, but we're doing so in a vacuum because the White House didn't really do it.
 
For the last four months, Obama could have had weekly or bi-weekly events of some sort with humble working- to middle-class Americans who got thrown off their plans over cancer or diabetes or whatever. Or merely who saw their premiums increase by 18% in a single year. He talked a lot about these things in abstract terms. But that isn't remotely the same as putting actual human faces on the narrative. TV eats that kind of thing up. If he'd had eight or 10 such sessions over the last 16 weeks, the polls would be better right now -- not massively, maybe, but better enough that it would matter.
 
Second, the administration -- Obama himself sometimes, but especially Rahm Emanuel -- have tonally mishandled the relationship with the left-activist-blogospheric wing. Every time one of those stories appeared on…

 Democrats should heed Daley's steer-to-the-center advice
By David S. Broder
Sunday, December 27, 2009; A21
On the day before Christmas, President Obama found two presents under his tree. One was the health-care reform bill passed that morning by the Senate, a historic measure so freighted with promise and problems that it could blow up. The other was an op-ed in The Post by William Daley, his fellow Chicagoan and one of the canniest Democrats I know, warning Obama that he is on the verge of losing his hold on the vital center of politics. Daley, a former commerce secretary who shares with his brother, Mayor Richard M. Daley, and their late father an iron grip on reality, cited all the signs of defection among swing voters whose support in 2006 and 2008 swelled Democratic ranks in Congress and elected Obama. He ticked off the losses Democrats suffered in the only two gubernatorial elections of 2009, in New Jersey and Virginia; the polls showing independents rejecting Democrats (and such handiwork as the health-care bill); a wave of early retirements by marginal House members; and, last week, the party switch by Alabama Rep. Parker Griffith from Democratic to Republican. To be sure, there are counter-indicators not mentioned by Daley, including a string of special election congressional victories for the Democrats, culminating in New York's 23rd District. The Republican civil war that enabled this upset is symptomatic of a growing GOP liability that could cripple the party's comeback hopes. But this does not weaken the thrust of Daley's main argument. His target is the left of his party -- the grass-roots liberal activists who condemn the centrist Democrats sitting in marginal seats for blocking some provisions of health-care reform, for example, and the leaders of organized…

             Nathanial Brooks for The New York TimesThe White House became involved in the efforts to boost the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, in the closing days of the campaign. The 23rd Congressional District leans Republican.  

  Obama: A breathtaking beginning Never mind 100 days, Barack Obama has used his first 100 hours to set the pace and scale of change. Rupert Cornwell reports from Washington Sunday, 25 January 2009
AFP/Getty Images Barack Obama swears the oath and becomes the 44th President of the United States of America Torture and CIA "ghost" prisons will be no more. Guantanamo Bay will be closed. Lo and behold, the leader of communist Cuba has called the 44th President of the United States "an honest man". The latter will, after all, have a BlackBerry, while the White House boasts a slick new website where news releases are repackaged as the Blog. Truly, in the first 100 hours of Barack Obama, change has come to America. In fact, change arrived in his first 100 minutes – before even the olive-green presidential helicopter carrying George W Bush into retirement had lifted off from the east plaza of the US Capitol, to the relief and joy of the two-thirds of Americans long sick of the sight of him. In these first four days in office Obama has made many decisions, some symbolic, some of substance. But nothing signalled a new era more powerfully than the inaugural address itself, his first official act after taking (incorrectly, as it transpired) the Oath of Office. More explicitly than almost any inaugural in history, the 21-minute speech repudiated the attitudes and policies of a departing president. The Bush administration's scorn for internationally stipulated rights of prisoners, its disregard for science, its high-handed foreign policy, and its blind veneration of the market – Obama disowned them all. So much so, indeed, that some Bush staffers went public with their fury when they learnt of the speech's contents. And though much, much…