Way too sensitive

The White House is getting testy about push-back from the “professional left”, White House unloads anger over criticism from ‘professional left’.  (Hopefully this isn’t’ the beginning of an Obama “triangulation” strategy).

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

While I’m not the “professional left” there’s some major false equivalency in there.  All most of us want is for him not to keep throwing us under the bus and to actually take on the “wing nuts” more often.  Via Chris Hayes, “This from Frum is *exactly* right, re: Gibbs outburst: “More proof of my…thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base”".

Bob Borosage has more, Here are six reasons Gibbs’ outburst doesn’t make much sense, not counting the fact that it will generate hundreds of articles like this.

This White House has passed historic initiatives — the biggest recovery act ever, comprehensive health care reform, financial reform, equal pay reforms, the largest increase in poverty spending since the 60s, the greatest expansion of service programs since the Great Depression, and much more. The White House understandably wants credit. It had a check list; it made the compromises it needed to make; it moved the ball forward. Why the carping?

But reality counts. We’re suffering mass unemployment. One in four homes with mortgages is underwater. Bankers were rescued, the debt increased, and politicians in both parties are starting to talk about cutting Social Security benefits. The war in Afghanistan is a mess. We can argue about whether the president fought hard enough, or compromised too soon — but the reality is that the reforms, as bold as they were, are not sufficient to deal with the mess we are in.

It’s a matter of perspective. Obviously the Obama Administration has made progress, in some areas. The most disconcerting part is that they’ve seemed more willing to throw their supporters, on the left, under the bus, then to take on the GOP and the “wing-nuts” head-on. That’s why appointing Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be a move in the right direction.

It’s a good thing that the White House is getting pressure from the left. If they were quiet that’s when they should get nervous. It means they’ve given up on Obama and will start looking for an alternative. That hasn’t happened….yet.

[UPDATE]: Gibbs Walked his comments back, kos adds his 2 cents, Inartful.

Based on Gibbs walkback, where he used the word “inartful” to describe his outburst, it seems that what set him off was an MSNBC segment with Dylan Ratigan.

So here’s Gibbs “reality” — something that a pseudo-conservative says on MSNBC says means that liberal bloggers want Canadian healthcare and the elimination of the Pentagon. Oh, and we wouldn’t be happy even if Dennis Kucinich was president. Because the blogosphere is a hotbed of Dennis Kucinich supporters. Sheesh.

Whatever. Gibbs is clearly locked up tight in his DC bubble. There’s no other way to explain how he’d think that Ratigan was somehow liberal. Why? Because he was on MSNBC? The same network that blacklisted me because I criticized Joe Scarborough? Criticism, by the way, that was defending the administration from his (and GOP) bullshit attacks?

I don’t care whether he likes me or other bloggers or “the professional left” or whatever. But fact is, the administration has a problem with its base. They can point to Obama’s favorability numbers among liberals all they want, but fact is there has been slippage.

Afflict the comfortable

The head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau needs to be someone who can, as is said, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. And the person to do just that is Elizabeth Warren. If you’re not familiar with her well you should be. Here’s a great article supporting her for the job by Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Nation, The Case For Elizabeth Warren.

It’s no mystery why the corporate/big business crowd opposes her. The effectiveness of the financial reform bill depends entirely on the regulators—it cedes them new power, but it doesn’t mandate systemic change. So the bankers and lobbyists want to diminish regulation as much as they can, which means opposing a determined and smart Warren.

Rather than sabotaging Warren’s prospects, Dodd and the administration, especially President Obama, should be touting the fact that Warren has been one of the leading activists and thinkers about what the bureau could get done, and that her stewardship led to it being one of the things we can celebrate in the final bill.

In her folksy, plainspoken way, Warren—who hails from Oklahoma and is a former Methodist Sunday school teacher—has articulated how the agency could help ordinary people, providing a small amount of power in a system that’s weighted against them. She has such an honest, fair, decent and clear way of talking about what government can do to serve the common good.

“Dang gummit, somebody has got to stand up on behalf of middle-class families!” she told the New York Times. She elaborated on this theme on the Daily Show. “This is America’s middle class. We’ve hacked at it and pulled at it and chipped at it for thirty years now, and now there’s no more to do. We fix this problem going forward, or the game really is over.”

When the Consumer Protection proposal came under attack in the Senate—and Dodd was watering it down in order to cut deals with Republicans who probably weren’t going to support it anyway—Warren continued to fight hard for it. She wrote about it, she talked about it. She even approached Ron Howard and got him to shoot this hilarious video plugging it as key to any financial reform bill with teeth.

Make no mistake, if the person who gets this job is someone the banksters are happy with then the wrong person got the job. Elizabeth Warren will protect consumers, and she’s the one for this job.