NOBODY QUESTIONS IT:

A Knife in Obama’s Back? : Maybe Rahm Emanuel is guilty of disloyalty, but he might be the only thing keeping Obama tethered to the reality-based community. (Jonah Goldberg, 3/03/10, National Review)

What really got tongues wagging was the ugliness of the White House chief of staff appearing to blame the president for his problems. Normally, a chief of staff falls on his sword for the boss; he doesn’t shove it into his boss’s back.

But Milbank makes an important point. “It’s worth noting,” he wrote in a Post chatroom discussion, “that nobody seems to be questioning the argument itself . . . which I take to be a good sign.”

I don’t know what he means by “good sign.” Good for Obama? Emanuel? The country? But Milbank is right that no one’s disputing his basic point: Obama and his sycophants are the problem. [...]

While so much of the hoopla over Milbank’s column focuses on personalities — like Darth Vader, Emanuel has earned his enemies — I think it all masks a more profound ideological insecurity, even a political identity crisis.

America is, quite simply, a center-right country. Many have cited polling data showing that self-described conservatives outnumber liberals two to one. But that’s not nearly so telling as the fact that self-identified conservatives have outnumbered liberals in every year since 1968; when combined with self-proclaimed moderates, the country is enduringly 65 to 75 percent moderate-to-conservative.

As president, Bill Clinton initially governed as if he’d won a more left-leaning mandate than the voters intended. Clinton admitted in a 1995 interview with the then-columnist Ben Wattenberg that he’d gone astray philosophically. With the help of Machiavellian pollster Dick Morris, Clinton recalibrated to the center and saved his presidency.

No surprise that Emanuel’s most politically formative years were spent as a Clinton strategist. Yet Obama has indicated that he never considered the Clinton model appropriate or appealing.

Clinton didn't find it appealing until the GOP controlled Congress. The UR is likely to be different post-Opocalypse too.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2010 7:34 AM