Hooray for David Broder!

This is great:

The size of the gambles that President Obama is taking every day is simply staggering. What came through in his speech to a joint session of Congress and a national television audience Tuesday night was a dramatic reminder of the unbelievable stakes he has placed on the table in his first month in office, putting at risk the future well-being of the country and the Democratic Party's control of Washington. ...

The risk to Obama's ambitions is likely to arise less from the defeated Republicans than from the victorious Democrats, who have all too many ideas of their own about what should be done in energy, health care and education.

And the other risk is in what he barely mentioned Tuesday: the rest of the world. Obama has just ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a country with a stumbling government and a shaky neighbor in Pakistan, and a place where the United States is still searching for a plausible strategy. ...

When we elected Obama, we didn't know what a gambler we were getting.

George W. Bush was the gambler (ask David Gergen about Bush's Iraq venture, for example).

But back to Broder. If you read his column, you will note that he has nothing to say about the rightness or wrongness of the policies Obama is proposing. Broder is only interested in process (e.g. "Is he naive? Does he not understand the political challenge he is inviting?"). All Broder has to say is

"Obama is trying to do a lot of stuff. Whoa Nellie!"

posted by Quiddity at 2/26/2009 11:03:00 AM