A couple of Washington Examiner columnists weigh in on Barack Obama's remarkable downturn of fortune. Perceptive, illuminating articles both.* Michael Barone: How could such smart people do so many stupid things? That question, or variations on it, is being asked in Washington and around the country about the Obama administration.
The same people who directed the campaign that defeated Hillary Clinton and routed John McCain, a campaign that raised far more money and attracted far more volunteers than any before it, have within a year come up with a legislative program that is crashing in ruins and that, to judge from recent polls, has left the Democratic party weaker than I have seen it in almost 50 years of closely following politics.
The 2008 campaign was an impressive achievement. So, in a negative way, is the 2009 legislative program that has left the Democrats in such woeful shape in 2010...
* Noemie Emery: Good politicians, like Ike and JFK (and yes, our Bill Clinton), use the landscape around them to shape coalitions that sustain them in power. Great politicians, like Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt, refashion the landscape, creating realignments that survive them by decades.
Obama, by contrast, has done something different: He first formed, and then shredded, his own coalition, creating wedge issues that splintered his party, with no help from opponents at all...
