The measure of President Obama should be the bar set for him by Candidate Obama. Unfortunately, the way the race has shaped up, the bar is set considerably lower. Take, for example, the questions David Axelrod was asked just before Super Tuesday. They included one about Newt Gingrich's call for Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to be fired and, of course, one about Rush Limbaugh's "slut" comments. That's a pretty low bar for the Obama campaign to jump over. And if, as the campaign moves forward, the majority of the questions President Obama and his surrogates are going to be faced with are simply responding to whatever outlandish statements are coming from the Republicans, that's clearly not going to be the most productive debate the country could be having. Given the real problems we're facing, and the fact that a presidential election should be the time to discuss and debate them, the bar should be much, much higher than that.
So instead of simply asking President Obama to respond to the most extreme or bizarre Republican statements, how about asking him instead to respond to the boldest and most ambitious statements from... Barack Obama?
At HuffPost, our plan for 2012 is to vigorously cover both tracks of the election. Which is to say that while we are exhaustively covering the race between President Obama and the Republican nominee, we're also going to be covering that second track: Obama vs. Obama. And we'll be covering it in a variety of ways: by comparing the reality of President Obama with the rhetoric of Candidate Obama; by focusing on real underlying problems in the country that are being temporarily masked by a slight improvement in the unemployment numbers; and by using satire.
NOOOOOOOOOOOBODY expects the Huffington Position! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: comparison, problem focus, satire, ruthless efficiency from not paying contributors, an almost fanatical devotion to Centrism, and a nice web layout - Oh damn! I'll come in again.
Look folks, if you're devoting your considerable reach and power to this re-election battle being about What Obama Hasn't Done Yet before he gets re-elected to have a chance to do it, I'm going to say that you may not be fully vested in the idea that he should be re-elected, follow? I understand that the President has made some mistakes, and has done things that I don't agree with, especially when it comes to civil liberties. Considering what he has accomplished, I'm hoping that this will be taken into balanced consideration. When the other party's response is "Let's reduce the last one hundred fifty years of American progress to a shiny, slightly concave crater of smooth, blackened glass and take a mulligan on everything after 'and the Union was preserved' okay?" I'm thinking the time for holding the President's feet to the fire on things is, you know, November 7th, and not now. I'm completely willing to have the debate Arianna wants...as soon as we keep the Morlocks, Mole People, and CHUDS in the GOP from eating our flesh.
Even better, I would think that time and energy would be invested in getting NANCY SMASH back her gavel, and keeping the Senate, in addition to keeping the White House. If you haven't noticed, the Republicans have spent the last 15 months dumping trucks of salt on the earth after covering it with napalm, cat pee, and graffiti that reads "TEA PARTY RULZ." We might want to do something about that rather than saying "You know, Candidate Obama hasn't delivered on all of his campaign promises." Congratulations on that insight and welcome to politics. Keeping those promises will require a Congress not led by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, capiche?
I'd say that I can't believe anyone in that position would be that dense, but given the person making the call, everyone should have expected it by now.
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