When President Obama used the occasion of the White House Ramadan iftar dinner to announce his support for the Ground Zero mosque, some of his partisans rushed to praise what they viewed as a ringing endorsement of the controversial project.
"Obama's forceful speech yesterday expressing strong support for Cordoba House--will go down as one of the finest moments of his presidency," wrote Washington Post reporter Greg Sargent. Obama, Sargent said, "isn't hedging a bit: He's saying that opposing the group's right to build the Islamic center is, in essence, un-American."
The problem was, just hours after the speech, Obama began to back away from his clarion call. I wasn't defending the mosque project, he explained. I was just defending the right of Muslims to build "a place of worship and a community center" on private property in Lower Manhattan. "I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there," Obama told reporters in Florida. "I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding."
Obama approval sinks to 42 percent in Gallup’s daily tracking poll. And this didn’t get much play, but earlier in the week Gallup surveyed Americans on how the president was handling a slew of issues.
Saying that the "9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event" is the same clinical thinking that encouraged downplaying Nidal Hassan's terrorist attack at Fort Hood because he was just some crazy person, as with the Times Square bomber.
It's not because Americans are traumatized that they object to a mosque being built at Ground Zero. It's that Ground Zero is the site of an attack on the country that was both violent and symbolic. Obama only addresses the violence, but not the symbolism. The Twin Towers were the target because they were a symbol of America's sinfulness in the minds of al Qaeda.
It's been one year since President Obama lost control of the message on health care reform, amid riotous town halls and alarms over death panels.
He has yet to wrest the narrative back, and now faces a campaign season in which health care, as well as other key issues, is increasingly defined more by Obama's opponents than by the White House.
The deaths this week of two political Old Bulls has inspired some harsh commentary.
Writers have noted that Dan Rostenkowski, longtime chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, went to "Club Fed" (as he called it) on minor corruption charges. They have written at length that Ted Stevens, senator from Alaska for 40 years, brought a lot of pork barrel projects to his state and was convicted on corruption charges -- a conviction overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct.
Let me put in a few good words for these two Old Bulls, whom I've followed in the 40 years that I've been co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
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