Who is this Drew Weston guy?

And has he been reading all of our stuff in the past year? In his post, Leadership Obama Style, he writes some pretty familiar themes:

What’s costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

…

Like most Americans I talk to, when I see the president on television, I now change the channel the same way I did with Bush. With Bush, I couldn’t stand his speeches because I knew he meant what he said. I knew he was going to follow through with one ignorant, dangerous, or misguided policy after another. With Obama, I can’t stand them because I realize he doesn’t mean what he says — or if he does, he just doesn’t have the fire in his belly to follow through. He can’t seem to muster the passion to fight for any of what he believes in, whatever that is. He’d make a great queen — his ceremonial addresses are magnificent — but he prefers to fly Air Force One at 60,000 feet and “stay above the fray.”

…

The problem with the president’s strategic team is that they don’t understand the difference between compromising on policy and compromising on core values. When it comes to policies, listen all you want to the Stones: “You can’t always get what you want” (although it would be nice if the administration tried sometime). But on issues of principle — like allowing regressive abortion amendments to be tacked onto a health care reform bill — get some stones. Make your case to the American people, make it evocatively, and draw the line in the sand. That’s how you earn people’s respect. That’s the only thing that will bring Independents back.

And that’s where the problem of message comes in. This White House has no coherent message on anything.

…

And capping off all of these aspects of the president’s leadership style is his preference for the lowest common denominator. That means you don’t really have to fight, you don’t have to take anybody on, you don’t take any risks. You just find what the public is so upset about that even the Republicans would stipulate to it if forced to (e.g., that excluding people from health care because they have “pre-existing conditions” is something we can’t continue to tolerate) and build it into whatever plan the special interests can hammer out around it.

Unfortunately, what Democrats just can’t seem to understand is that the politics of the lowest common denominator is always a losing politics. It sends a meta-message that you’re weak — nothing more, nothing less — and that’s the cross the Democrats have had to bear since they “lost China” 60 years ago. And in fact, it is weak.

and then there’s this:

I don’t honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn’t figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he’s not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he’s going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they’re seeing right now is “liberalism,” and they don’t like what they see. I don’t, either.

What’s they’re seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass.

This is all stuff we’ve been saying since January 2008.  Obama is a weak president who is crippled by his inexperience, no earned political coalitions and a political philosophy lacking in core Democratic principles.  It was all right there for everyone to see.  Everyone, that is, who wasn’t blinded by his branding team.

I’ve never heard of Drew Weston before but he’s special enough to get a post on HuffPo.  He’s just two years too late.

PS. I find it interesting that Jane Hamsher is ready to entertain the idea of partnering with the Tea Partiers.  Jane seems to have skipped over the people who could help her most (that would be us), and went straight to the right side of the political divide.  Very odd that she would choose to ignore the people who agree with her on almost every issue but were ostracized by the netroots last year because we rooted for the girl during the last election cycle.  Maybe the taint of the false accusations of racism still hang around us like a nasty fart.   You’d think she’d be able to see through that by now.  We’re off limits but somehow the Tea Partiers smell like a breath of fresh air?

Jane needs to step back and think about that before she tries to entice the Glenn Beck fans.  There are a lot of us and we’re much easier to reason with.

Koolaid Detox Open Thread

Here’s something I thought I’d never see on the rec list at the Cheeto:

Barack Obama, the base appears to have lost faith in you, by icebergslim

And for President Nelson’s statement and his willingness to vote for the GROUND BREAKING legislation, OFA is giving its members scripts and are calling Nebraskans to thank them for Ben Nelson’s vote. Isn’t that just amazing? Calling an obstructionist and thanking him? Have the White House taken its smart bills lately? Oh, let us not forget President Nelson’s kickback or what he gets for his state for his vote.

Anyway, all this makes you wonder how this bill got to this form. It is easy for me to state, lack of leadership from the man at the top, Barack Obama.

We watched all year, especially this summer, Mr. Obama’s aloofness, non-chalant, hands off approach to this bill. We watched Mr. Obama continue to give time extensions to the Baucus Bill. In reality, this is the bill he always wanted. Why? Because this bill caters to all the deals he has made before the bill was even crafted, especially to the pharmaceutical companies.

The ultimate mean and nasty bully who shilled for Obama day and night all through 2008 and well into 2009 has finally awakened to reality. Too late to make a difference, but still she is awake. She is also an insider, basically confirming what we have all thought and what myiq wrote about so eloquently earlier tonight.

And this from a conservative, Mickey Edwards, at the Atlantic: Obama and the Republicans

Edwards attemps to make the case that, while Obama really isn’t a conservative, his positions are much closer to traditional Republican philosophy than those of George W. Bush. I don’t totally buy his arguments, but this still shows that people are both sides of the political spectrum are beginning to see Obama for who he really is. He hasn’t even been President for a year yet, and he’s no longer really fooling anyone. His approval ratings are below 50%. Congress is about to pass a horrendous bill that is nothing more than a giveaway to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. To top it off, the bill contains an amendment that will effectively make abortion unavailable in many states.

Does the Democratic Party even have a future? Was destroying the Democratic Party part of the plan too?

This is an open thread.

UPDATE: Jane Hamsher proposes a political alliance between progressives and the tea partiers.

Left/Right Populist Outrage Will Defeat Senate Health Care Bill

There is an enormous, rising tide of populism that crosses party lines in objection to the Senate bill. We opposed the bank bailouts, the AIG bonuses, the lack of transparency about the Federal Reserve, “bailout” Ben Bernanke, and the way the Democrats have used their power to sell the country’s resources to secure their own personal advantage, just as the libertarians have. In fact, we’ve worked together with them to oppose these things. What we agree on: both parties are working against the interests of the public, the only difference is in the messaging.

The last two paragraphs of Hamsher’s piece are stunning.

Rahm Emanuel has convinced himself that Ron Brownstein is a “liberal” and dismisses all of this as “the progressive backlash against the progressive backlash.” He’s betting that any inadequacies will be forgotten come November 2010 if the Dems can claim a “w” by passing any crap bill and slapping “health care” on it. And that if Congress just spends the next year naming post offices, any objections that Americans might have to paying 8% of their incomes to private corporations who will use the IRS as their collection agency will just disappear.

It’s scary to think that people this obscenely stupid are running the country. All the while, the painfully obvious left/right transpartisan consensus that is coalescing against DC insiders of both parties appears to be taking everyone by surprise.

Jane is mad as hell. I hope she’s right.