Eleven Dimensional Hyper-Chess For Dummies

Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum argues that Obama keeps winning, so the Republicans make sure to exact their pound of flesh for each victory and that it has taken a toll.

With this weekend’s decisive Senate repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for gay service members, can anyone seriously doubt Barack Obama’s patient willingness to play the long game? Or his remarkable success in doing so? In less than two years in office—often against the odds and the smart money’s predictions at any given moment—Obama has managed to achieve a landmark overhaul of the nation’s health insurance system; the most sweeping change in the financial regulatory system since the Great Depression; the stabilization of the domestic auto industry; and the repeal of a once well-intended policy that even the military itself had come to see as unnecessary and unfair.

So why isn’t his political standing higher?

Precisely because of the raft of legislative victories he’s achieved. Obama has pushed through large and complicated new government initiatives at a time of record-low public trust in government (and in institutions of any sort, for that matter), and he has suffered not because he hasn’t “done” anything but because he’s done so much—way, way too much in the eyes of his most conservative critics. With each victory, Obama’s opponents grow more frustrated, filling the airwaves and what passes for political discourse with fulminations about some supposed sin or another. Is it any wonder the guy is bleeding a bit? For his part, Obama resists the pugilistic impulse. To him, the merit of all these programs has been self-evident, and he has been the first to acknowledge that he has not always done all he could to explain them, sensibly and simply, to the American public.

Purdum goes on to say that Obama has made his share of mistakes too, and those have been magnified by the Republicans as well.   Bob Cesca points out that Republicans can't stand the fact that Obama keeps beating them so they try to make the victories as costly and as painful as possible, and adds that Republicans aren't the only ones who want to see Obama burn.

I would also argue that the same thing can be said about the president's progressive enemies. The establishment press continues to operate under the false impression that the progressive movement elected this president. Wrong. Many of the top shelf progressive leaders were ambivalent at best about Barack Obama during the campaign. John Edwards was the progressive candidate. Not the president. As such, there's no real motivation among some progressives to see the successes, since they had little to do with the election of the president in the first place.

He's got a point.  People often speak of disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters going after Obama and swinging to the Republicans on occasion in order to punish what they see as his betrayal, but few folks talk about the ever more rabid group of progressives that never forgave Obama for beating John Edwards, hindsight about Edwards own personal foibles be damned.

There's a group of hard-core lefties that never saw Obama as anything more than a DINO, and that America was suckered into voting for him by a particularly slick campaign.  And they've never been too fond of his many accomplishments either.

Keep that in mind as the President signs DADT repeal into law this morning.