"Obama Closes In on Big Wins in Lame-Duck Congress" — says the New York Times.

The home page looks like this:




At the link, the headline tones down the pro-Obama spin:

Could Lame Duck Be a Big Win for Obama Agenda?

Is President Obama on the verge of one of his most productive months in office?...

In the early hours of Friday morning, the president won passage of the $858 billion tax deal he reached with Republicans and he appears close to achieving approval of the landmark nuclear treaty he negotiated with the Russians. Both political parties have grudgingly agreed to do whatever is necessary to keep the federal government operating by approving an extension of the current budget authority into early next year.

And in something of a surprise, it appears there may be enough Republican support to provide Mr. Obama with a victory on a key promise: to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that bars gay people from serving opening in the armed forces.

AND: By contrast, Politico:

Democrats concede budget fight to Republicans.

Senate Democrats abruptly abandoned an omnibus budget bill for the coming year, pushing major spending decisions into the next Congress and giving Republicans immense new leverage to confront President Barack Obama priorities.

But see Krauthammer:

Remember the question after Election Day: Can Obama move to the center to win back the independents who had abandoned the party in November? And if so, how long would it take? Answer: Five weeks. An indoor record, although an asterisk should denote that he had help - Republicans clearing his path and sprinkling it with rose petals.

The conservative gloaters were simply fooled again by the flapping and squawking that liberals ritually engage in before folding at Obama's feet....

And Obama pulled this off at his lowest political ebb...

"Will Barack Obama depart as President of the United States?"

You can bet on it.

Muttering "Fuck the President" — "was just expressing frustration from a very frustrated Member.”

 According to the Democratic congresswoman who was interrupted by those words.

I  love when a "frustrated Member" calls out for fucking.

And isn't it interesting that when the call went out to "fuck the President," Bill Clinton popped right up as the apparent President?

And we know all about his frustrated member. What?! Not fair to dredge up the ancient history of the Clinton impeachment? The NYT just dragged Richard Nixon's rotting corpse across the stage.

Quick! Look! Over there! It's Nixon!!!!!

Well, now you know Obama's really in trouble. The corpse of Richard Nixon is being dragged across the stage one more time.

Richard M. Nixon made disparaging remarks about Jews, blacks, Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans in a series of extended conversations with top aides and his personal secretary, recorded in the Oval Office 16 months before he resigned as president.

Disparaging Remarks! Made in 1973!! America! Wake up!!! The GOP will destroy us!

“The Jews have certain traits,” [Nixon] said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

...“The Italians, of course, those people course don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but,” and his voice trailed off.

A moment later, Nixon returned to Jews: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

Apparently, these are newly released recordings — 265 more hours of Nixon talk — but it sounds like stuff we've heard a thousand times before.  But what a lovely distraction for us on this wintry weekend, when we might otherwise be wondering who, among the living, doesn't have his head screwed on tight.

"Approval By Numbers: How Obama Compares To Past Presidents."

A chart graphing the popularity of 11 Presidents over a 2-year time line.

Click forward to see individual comparisons, such as Bush 43 and Obama. The closest similarity is to Jimmy Carter.

Matt Bai identifies "the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work."

He begins with the example of the the new get-naked-or-groped TSA policy and goes on:

From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled...

I add my longtime blog tag "Obama stumbles" to this post.

... blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry....

Bai notes that during the Reagan and Clinton years, America turned away from "the era of big government," but then:

[T]he unraveling of the second Bush administration and the 2008 election... persuaded a lot of long-dispirited liberals that their philosophy, and not simply their party, had been restored. 

What a delusion!

Obama's approval rating is now at 39%.

It's so low it's one point ahead of the puzzlingly popular Sarah Palin.

And it's nowhere near George Bush's low point. If Obama feels bad about his current predicament, let him take some advice from George Bush:

LAUER:  When you left office, President Bush, your popularity numbers were around 30 percent, give or take, depending on the poll.  You say it... It didn't bother you?

BUSH: No, it didn't.

LAUER: You know, I try to personalize that.  I-- I've been doin' this job for 14 years.  And if after 14 years, only 30 percent of people who've watched this show think I did a good job--

BUSH: They'll fire ya.

LAUER: Well, it's gonna hurt like hell.

BUSH: I don't think it does.  No.  Because I-- I also was, as you just mentioned, at one time over 90 percent.  I didn't take it seriously then.  I don't take it-- didn't take it seriously when I left office.  Somebody walked up to me the other day and said, "Congratulations.  Your popularity is way up since you left office."  And my answer was, "So what?"  Seriously.  I mean if you chase popularity, you're chasing a moment.  You're chasing a poof of air.

If you chase popularity... you're chasing a poof of air.

On the other hand, this is a democracy. And, like the man said, They'll fire ya.

"While the president has been on a trip to Asia for the past 10 days, all but a few of his top aides stayed behind to figure out what went so wrong and what to do about it."

WaPo reports:

One adviser said they spent the past dozen days "soul-searching."

Another said that, around the White House, "people aren't just sitting around doing soul-searching. They're gaming out the short, medium and long term."

Gaming out.... Am I wrong to hear that as electoral politics?

Advisers also said it will probably take months, if not longer, to develop a strategy for restoring some of the early promise of the Obama presidency, particularly the notion that he was a different kind of Democrat.

In a nod to that ambition, his weekly address Saturday focused on earmark reform, one way, Obama said, of "restoring public trust." 

Am I wrong to hear this as a repulsive desire to re-engulf us in a mindless hopey-changey mood? I don't care about a feeling of "promise." I see America's grim sense of reality as a hard-won accomplishment. We're awake now. The dream is over.

Over the next few days, White House officials said they will begin to gauge whether they can forge an alliance with any top Republicans, many of whom are scheduled to attend a bipartisan meeting at the White House on Thursday. Although Obama could benefit from a high-profile compromise - perhaps on extending the Bush-era tax cuts or on other tax initiatives set to expire before the end of the year - officials are also prepared to point out any Republican intransigence.

The medium and long term game plan is the Republicans will screw up enough to take advantage of. The short-term plan is to look willing to so something bipartisan and beneficent.

"President Obama is coming home from his overseas trip pretty much empty-handed."

"After watching his party take a beating in the midterm elections, Obama wasn't able to secure even a symbolic victory on a trip that was expected to give him plenty of opportunities to claim a win.... Obama's inauspicious 10-day, four-nation trip included a failure to land an anticipated slam dunk free trade agreement with South Korea."

"I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary."

Said Valerie Jarrett:

He knows exactly how smart he is. ... He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them...

So this "sense" you refer to.... it's the end result of a digestive process?

... and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ... So, what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. ... He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

Oh, my lord. This is the way the people have buttered him up his whole life, I'm afraid. How will he deal with the rude affront he received last Tuesday? Is there an Obama that fits the changed circumstances or was his entire being formed through relationships with sycophants?

Maureen Dowd speaks of Obama's "righteous self-regard."

In context:

At first it was exciting that Obama was the sort of brainy, cultivated Democrat who would be at home in a “West Wing” episode.

But now he acts like he really thinks he’s on “West Wing,” gliding through an imaginary, amber-lit set where his righteous self-regard is bound to be rewarded by the end of the hour.

I've never watched "West Wing," and that reference doesn't make me regret my avoidance of it.

His arrogance led him to assume: If I build it, they will understand. He can’t get the gratitude he feels he deserves for his achievements if no one knows what he achieved and why those achievements are so vital.

People liked him. And we liked the idea of ourselves liking him. The mistake was for him ever to think that made us want the things on the Democrats' wish list.

We want the best people to govern us, but many voters are so turned off by Obama’s superior air that they’re rushing into the arms of disturbingly inferior pols.

No. We hate the policies, and we're voting for the people who will undo them. It doesn't matter if they aren't as sleek and pretty. We want out of the place where the glamorous hero led us.

"I don't think you like the man."

Something "really bothered" Glenn Loury about "all that adulation," but....

Obama emailed me: "That change happens only from the bottom up. That change happens only because of you."

I'm going to ignore the way he called me "the bottom" and just feel relived that "change happens only because of [me]." What power I have! I can stop all this.

It's Rouse...

... to rouse us from our malaise lethargy.

"Velma Hart, an Obama supporter who, employing an O'Donnellesque unidiomatic preposition, told the president she was 'exhausted of defending you.'"

Ha ha. James Taranto is, like me, distracted by the wrong preposition. (I said, about O'Donnell: "It bugs me more that she says 'dabbled into' than that she actually did it (or claimed to).") Taranto is writing about Margaret Carlson's response to Hart, which is important because Carlson "personifies liberal Beltway conventionality."

"It's all about the insularity. Otherwise how do you explain how a group who came in with more goodwill in decades squandered it?"

A quote from "a longtime Democratic strategist who works with the White House on a variety of issues." He says that Obama and his inner circle "miscalculated where people were out in the country on jobs, on spending, on the deficit, on debt... They have not been able to get ahead of any of it."

From an article about how members of that inner circle are going to be leaving:

The inner circle - Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, senior advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, press secretary Robert Gibbs and Vice President Biden - is breaking up, or at least breaking open. Emanuel is widely expected to run for mayor of Chicago, and Axelrod is likely to leave this spring to prepare for Obama's 2012 reelection effort.

Obama will soon lose other top advisers. His chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, announced that he will return to Harvard, where he is a professor; Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina is expected to join Axelrod in Chicago; and national security adviser James L. Jones is said to want out by the end of the year.

Some former aides and allies of the president expressed hope that Obama will take advantage of the departures - which are common at the two-year point in any presidency - to bring in outsiders who will challenge the president's current team.

Like some sort of "Team of Rivals"? If only he'd thought about that at the outset of his presidency!

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic...

"President Barack Obama is helped by Vermont Governor Jim Douglas to move a couch in the Oval Office, Feb. 2, 2009. Governor Douglas met with the President about the economic recovery plan."

"How did the first president of color become so colorless?"

Asks Maureen Dowd:

The president is everywhere, trying to get more aggressive and recapture some of his “Yes we can” mojo in an effort to fend off the rebuke that’s barreling toward him from voters this fall.

"There's no chance that OFA is going to have the slightest impact on the midterms."

If your response to that was "what's OFA?" then that's the point.

Obama: "They talk about me like a dog."

"That's not in my prepared remarks." Uh, okay. You just threw that in, then. But why?

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin said:

The Mickey Mouse microphone is mocking Obama's ears too.

Ha. And Meade is saying to me — out loud, in the flesh:

I'd like Obama to say exactly who said what and when. Be more specific!

Also I said: Poor Obama, he got so used to people treating him like he was so wonderful, and Meade said: "They treated him like a god, then they treated him like a dog." The old god/dog flip!