And, like all entertaining wars to the knife, this one has multiple factions. The ‘moderates’ blame the liberals for walking all over them; the liberals blame the moderates for going along with passing bad ideas like the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and Obamacare; the idiots (this may be a subgroup: there’s a bit of an overlap here with the first two groups) are claiming that this entire problem would have gone away with a little more marketing; and everybody blames the President.  Because really, why not?  It’s fairly clear by now that being on Barack Obama’s good side is not exactly inherently valuable.  They’re all right, of course: the Democratic debacle in the House represents a perfect storm of legislative cowardice, political greed, a grotesquely flawed group understanding of proper civic policy, and a White House that routinely demonstrates the organizational and administrative core competency that normally one associates with opium-raddled Victorian expatriate remittance men.  None of which helps them right now, of course; but it’s a lot of fun to point out.

As to solving their problem…  well, even if I wanted to I couldn’t.  Congressional Democrats are only going to be united by one person – the President – and just in case there’s still somebody who hasn’t noticed by now: the President is incompetent at leading people in directions that they don’t already want to go.  Which is not what the Democrats need right now.  So there’s no solution in sight, unless of course the President wants to start learning all of those boring, practical political skills that he should have started picking up a couple of decades ago…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

(Via @davidhauptmann)