Peggy Noonan comments on the exchange between Blanche Lincoln and Barack Obama that we also noted the other day — the President appears to be doubling down on his agenda and seems not to care about the political consequences of doing so:

His reaction to all this is striking. He doesn’t seem a man at sea who’s flailing and trying to grab any deck chair that floats by. He seems a man who is certain he is right, in the long term if not in the day-to-day. And if the cost of being right is a single term, then so be it. Which, again, is not how presidents usually think. And not how legislators, who live to be re-elected, want the president of their party to think…

it is 2010, and Mr. Bush is gone. Mr. Obama is left with America, and he does not, really, understand it. That is why he thinks moving to the center would be political death, when moving to the center and triangulating, as Bill Clinton did, might give him a new lease on life.

It is possible that Noonan is right and Obama really believes that “moving to the center would be political death,” but it is also possible that there are other explanations for what appears to us to be a sure-fire political loser.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 at 7:30 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.