Is Our President Learning?

The short answer appears to be "yes, but very slowly". 

I would have been greatly encouraged if something like the following had appeared in "The New York Times" in, say, December, 2008:

Obama Is an Avid Reader, and Critic, of the News

...
The news media have played a crucial role in Mr. Obama’s career, helping to make him a national star not long after he had been an anonymous state legislator. As president, however, he has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion. He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans oppose almost any tax increase to reduce the deficit.

Privately and publicly, Mr. Obama has articulated what he sees as two overarching problems: coverage that focuses on political winners and losers rather than substance; and a “false balance,” in which two opposing sides are given equal weight regardless of the facts.

Mr. Obama has said the lack of an effective narrative has been one of his administration’s biggest missteps. “The mistake of my first term — couple of years — was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” Mr. Obama said in an interview last month with CBS’s Charlie Rose. “But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people.”

While Mr. Obama frequently criticizes the heated speech of cable news, he sees what he views as deeper problems in news outlets that strive for objectivity. In private meetings with columnists, he has talked about the concept of “false balance” — that reporters should not give equal weight to both sides of an argument when one side is factually incorrect. He frequently cites the coverage of health care and the stimulus package as examples, according to aides familiar with the meetings.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, was previously Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief. He said the president thought that some journalists were more comfortable blaming both parties, regardless of the facts. “To be saying ‘they’re both equally wrong’ or ‘they’re both equally bad,’ ” Mr. Carney said, “then you look high-minded.”

The term “false balance,” which has been embraced by many Democrats, emerged in academic papers in the 1990s to describe global-warming coverage.

“I believe this type of ‘accuracy’ and ‘balance’ are a huge thing afflicting contemporary media,” said Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of the left-leaning Web site Talking Points Memo.
...

But it didn't. 

 Nor did any of this high-order thinking show up in print in 2009, or in 2010, or in 2011.

The depressing fact is, it apparently took until this week for the Obama Administration to fully dial into the fact that Centrism is nothing but Conservative-enabling bullshit.  Which maybe -- just maybe -- had something to do with the with the kinds of columnists with whom President chose to have his "small sit-downs": 

...
In dealing directly with the news media, Mr. Obama prefers small sit-downs with columnists, including The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne and Ruth Marcus, and The New York Times’s David Brooks, among others... 

The topic of "Centrism is Corrosive Bullshit" is not merely one which I and many, many other Liberals columnists have have written about thousands and thousands of times at exhaustive and exhausting length over the past decade,  but it is also a topic which almost any Liberal I know would have been more than happy to straighten the Obama Administration out on had they ever bothered to ask during one of the President's many little "summit meetings" with the smaller digital ink-stained wretches:

In addition to well-known columnists, Mr. Obama also holds summit meetings with niche online outlets that did not have access, or did not exist, during previous administrations, including personal finance Web sites like The Consumerist and Fool.com, and African-American Web sites like Jack & Jill Politics, The Root and theGrio.

Regular readers of this blog know that I consider the Big Lie of Centrism to be the most destructive political force abroad in modern America, because it is our greatest enabling lie -- the Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible.  Readers know that I believe the main political mission of Liberalism in the short term must be to raze the edifice of Fame Centrism to the ground and then salt the ground. 

To that end, it seemed like a good time to re-run this post, which I wrote back in 2010, shortly after the Democratic Party got crushed as a direct result of buying into the core Centrist delusion that if Democrats (and only Democrats) would just compromise with the batshit Right...and then compromise some more...and then compromise a little more....and then compromise just a weeee bit more....the Randite Supermen could be appeased sufficiently to hold off nuking the global economy for a little while longer.

Because now that the Administration appears to be paying attention, maybe they're actually paying attention

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Left


For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.

Since he showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as

Half black and half white...
Half American urbanite, half world-citizen...
Half wonk, half preacher...
Half Harvard Yard, half Back o' the Yards...
Half red and half blue...

And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the Presidency...if this were 1960.

But it is not 1960 -- nor is he dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols -- and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly broken no longer works.

Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefor, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.

From Paul Krugman:

Lacking All Conviction

Mark Thoma directs us to an appalling story — apparently Obama held a meeting after the midterm to debate whether our unemployment problem is cyclical or structural.

What I want to know is, who was arguing for structural? I find it hard to think of anyone I know in the administration’s economic team who would make that case, who would deny that the bulk of the rise in unemployment since 2007 is cyclical. And as I and others have been trying to point out, none of the signatures of structural unemployment are visible: there are no large groups of workers with rising wages, there are no large parts of the labor force at full employment, there are no full-employment states aside from Nebraska and the Dakotas, inflation is falling, not rising.

More generally, I can’t think of any Democratic-leaning economists who think the problem is largely structural.
...

In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

And that this is your fight, President Obama.

This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be shirked and cannot be delegate.

If you take up this challenge, millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.

But if you cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and truly fucked.