16 | January | 2012 | Robot Pirate Ninja

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics – The Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html

If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective.

The question is whether or not the corporate media will acknowledge this state of affairs or continues to try and forment the dischord that draws so many more eyeballs than people sitting around pleasantly agreeing about reality.

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics – The Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html

All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

It’s kinda funny, but the only President during my lifetime to oversee a real reduction in spending from one year to the next is the current one. Now the numbers show the same kind of decline in government employment…and still folks think they can tar Obama with a “socialist” label.

The rest of Sullivan’s piece gets at more of this reality-rejecting trend in Obama bashing. Good read, but only for realists.