Frank Rich is asking about Obama's convictions or lack of convictions a point that I have been making for about two years. Like Bush or not, agree or disagree with him, one thing you can not say is that he lacked conviction. Is the media beginning to realize this and the fact that there is no substance behind the rhetoric?
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Those Obama fans who are disappointed keep looking for explanations. Is he too impressed by the elite he met in Cambridge, too eager to split the difference between left and right, too willing to compromise? As he pursues legislation, why does he keep deferring to others — whether to his party’s Congressional leaders or the Congressional Budget Office or to this month’s acting president, Olympia Snowe? Why doesn’t he ever draw a line in the sand? “We know Obama has good values,” Jeff Madrick said to me last week, “but we don’t know if he has convictions.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/op...rich.html?_r=1
Also, this is interesting from Peggy Noonan.
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I'm not sure the White House can tell the difference between campaign mode and governing mode, but it is the difference between "us versus them" and "us." People sense the president does too much of the former, and this is reflected not only in words but decisions, such as the pursuit of a health-care agenda that was inevitably divisive. It has lost the public's enthusiastic backing, if it ever had it, but is gaining on Capitol Hill. People don't want whatever it is they're about to get, and they're about to get it. In that atmosphere everything grates, but most especially us-versus-them-ism.
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Peggy Noonan: There Is No New Frontier - WSJ.com
One concern I have with Obama is his unwillingness to act in a manner consistent with being the President. He is "the man", and he needs to act like it. We don't need a commander-in-compromise.
One final note, it is a tragedy that our President still does not know what he wants to do in Afghanistan. we are at war, we have been at war, how can he not know what he wants to do? How could he have had a waking moment when he has not been thinking about our national defense, about our soldiers risking their lives - I know liberals wanted to impeach Bush, but if anything would merit a President from being removed from office it should be not taking war seriously.
