Reminder-in-Chief

It may be late in the day, but I think Obama's working toward his own 'stay the course':

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  You said this week that Democrats wouldn’t do well in the November elections if it turns out to be a referendum on the economy.  But with millions of people out of work and millions of people losing their homes, how could it not be a referendum on the economy and your handling of it, and why would you not welcome that?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, the -- what I said was that if it was just a referendum on whether we’ve made the kind of progress that we need to, then people around the country would say we’re not there yet.  If the election is about the policies that are going to move us forward versus the policies that will get us back into a mess, then I think the Democrats will do very well.  And here’s why.

As I just indicated, middle-class families had been struggling for a decade, before I came into office. Their wages and incomes had flat-lined.  They were seeing the cost of everything from health care to sending their kids to college going up. Job growth was the weakest of any economic expansion between 2001 and 2008 since World War II.  The pace was slower than it’s been over the last year.

So these policies of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, of stripping away regulations that protect consumers, running up a record surplus to a record deficit -- those policies finally culminated in the worst financial crisis we’ve had since the Great Depression.  And for 19 months, what we have done is steadily worked to avoid a depression, to take an economy that was contracting rapidly and making it grow again; a situation where we were losing 750,000 jobs a month, and now we’ve had eight consecutive months of private sector job growth; and made investments that are going to strengthen the economy over the long term.

Ah, September: bedwetting season for Democrats

This time last year (okay, Sept. 12 '08), as McCain surged ahead of Obama in the polls in the wake of Sarah Palin's demagogic debut and a ghoulish supporting cast blasting away at the "community organizer" in the Republican Convention, David Plouffe was ruefully downplaying the panic of Democratic "bedwetters." Here we go again: after a month of gleeful lying about health care reform in town hall meetings, Republicans smell blood and Dems are wetting away as Obama's poll numbers sag.

I am confident that Obama will once again prove calmer, more focused, smarter than his critics. As Jonathan Chait and John Dickerson have pointed out, premature postmortems detailing his purported errors -- too uncompromisingly liberal, too focused rhetorically on reducing costs rather than increasing coverage, too passive in the legislative process -- are wrong where they're not mutually exclusive. In hindsight, again, we'll recognize that Obama was consistent and focused, and that he gave his adversaries space to hang themselves. Concessions and scaling back, as with the stimulus bill, will loom large and disappoint, but in hindsight it will be recognized that the legislation that passes constituted a giant step toward universal coverage.

Meanwhile, the dominant narrative comes across visually as much as verbally. Our radiant One has become the frowning, nonplussed, beleaguered One, per above. Let's see if the image changes after his speech on health care reform next Wednesday.