NYTIMES IN DENIAL ABOUT OBAMA'S FAILURE TO TACK TO THE CENTER

NYTIMES: "Where Clinton Turned Right, Obama Plowed Ahead"

When President Bill Clinton faced a Republican uprising and a nation that turned deeply skeptical about his agenda, he used the 1996 State of the Union address to declare that “the era of big government is over.”

That move to the middle — arguably more rhetoric than reality — stopped Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in its tracks. So why did President Barack Obama go a different route on Wednesday night, giving little ground and declaring that the problem was not his agenda but a deficit of trust in government and of pragmatism? If there was a defining line in Mr. Obama’s speech, it might have been “Let’s try common sense,” to which he ad-libbed, “a novel concept.”


The difference may lie in very different times. Mr. Clinton had already lost Congress by the time he gave that speech. Mr. Obama’s message was that Democrats should not be so certain that they were about to suffer the same fate. He pointedly reminded them that while they may have lost their 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, they have not lost control of either house of Congress — at least not yet.

THIS IS PURE DENIAL. THE TIMES ARE NOT DIFFERENT. THE MEN ARE.

CLINTON WAS A POLITICIAN FIRST. OBAMA IS AN IDEOLOGUE FIRST.

• CLINTON WHO RAN AS A MODERATE BUT THEN GOVERNED FOR THE FIRST TWO YEARS AS A LEFTIST, MOVED BACK TO THE CENTER TO SURVIVE, AND THEN THRIVED.

• OBAMA - WHO ALSO RAN AS A CENTRIST, BUT WHO HAS GOVERNED LIKE A LEFTIST - WON'T DO THIS BECAUSE HE IS REALLY A DEEPLY COMMITTED RADICAL LEFTIST.

WELL, THERE IS ONE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TIMES: IN1994 THERE WAS ACTUALLY LESS DISCONTENT WITH THE DEMOCRAT/LIBERAL AGENDA THAN THERE IS NOW.

2010 WILL BE WORSE FOR DEMOCRATS THAN 1994 - AND BETTER FORE THRE USA!