The Barack Obama Administration: A Failure !

Hey, don't blame me, its the folks at the New York Times who are already throwing in the towel:

White House reporters for The New York Times predict that the market collapse will force President-elect Barack Obama to abandon for now many of his campaign promises. If his stimulus plan "doesn’t work out, he may very well be a one-term president,” said Jeff Zeleny, who covered Obama’s campaign. “It’s hard to imagine that he could be reelected if the economy’s in the exact same position four years from now.”

“A lot of the things he said on the campaign trail you can now dispense with,” said correspondent Peter Baker."

Good news followed by good news - if only he dispensed with "most of" the things ( as opposed to "a lot of") he promised on the campaign trail, then I would sleep better at night.

But maybe this will help:

"You’re not going to see universal health care, I don’t think, this year,” Baker said. “You’re not going to see a cap on carbon emissions, as he has promised, probably, this year.”

Maybe not ever? One can dream....funny, though, why do I get the feeling that these are the things that the NYT thinks will prevent Obama from winning a second term, when in fact the cautious realism that the Times bemoans are the very things that may actually help Obama get re-elected to a second term?

Now this - this is priceless:

"If Obama succeeds, it’s like Eisenhower after Truman,” Baker said, pointing out that Eisenhower perpetuated many of Truman’s anticommunist policies, winning over a public that had been resistant to his predecessor’s ideas.

So Bush is actually right about everything, but we must say he is wrong because he maintains membership in the socially incorrect political party? And therefore, all Barack has to do is maintain Bush policies - but with a friendlier face and better diction - and he is a guarenteed success?

The mind reels...but there may be less to all this than meets the eye. As Sarah Palin recently said about Katie Couric, " Katie, you're not the center of everybody's universe":

Assistant managing editor Rick Berke, who moderated the panel, noted that Obama had already departed from Bush’s precedent in one important respect: He hasn’t sat for a post-election interview with the Times.
“When the current president was elected, one of the first things he did was sit down with The New York Times and a battery of reporters,” Berke said. “This president has not sat down with our New York Times press corps in a very long time, as even Bush did.”

So is this the reason for the NYT's fit of pique, and subsequent declaration that his failure to strictly live up to liberal principles will lose him his job? Or are the just irked to see Obama "working the middle" ?

Me, I hope they're right, but for the wrong reasons...