Ezra Klein: "Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause"

Alex Wong/Getty Images-Lawrence Summers, then director of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Washington, D.C., December 2011

Ezra Klein (NY Review of Books):

At the end of the book, Suskind is sitting in the White House with Obama. “Leadership in this office is not a matter of you being confident,” the President reflects. “Leadership in this office is a matter of helping the American people feel confident.”

But the president needs to do more than lead. He needs to govern. And when he has so convinced the American people of his leadership that their expectations for his term far exceed his—or anyone’s—capacity to govern, disappointment results. That’s when they go looking for another confidence man—one whose promises aren’t sullied by the compromises and concession made in the effort to deliver results—and the cycle begins anew. MORE...

Ezra Klein on "Cash Warfare" with Naomi Klein (video)

Ezra Klein (The Rachel Maddow Show), with video (10:00).

Ezra Klein: "Osama bin Laden didn’t win, but he was ‘enormously successful’"

Ezra Klein (WaPo):

Osama bin Laden "...had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit. MORE...

Ezra Klein: "The disillusionment of David Axelrod"

Ezra Klein:

Noam Scheiber's profile of the disillusioned David Axelrod is worth reading. Axelrod, who's been hamhanded at best in his role as Special Envoy to the Professional Left, appears to share their critique of the administration almost entirely. He's presented as being uncomfortable with the concessions of governing, the power of the special interests, the paralysis of the Congress, the wages of pragmatism. He sounds, well, like a liberal.

I can't say whether Scheiber gets Axelrod right, but the article rings true: I've found Axelrod a puzzling spokesperson because he seems defensive over the administration's compromises rather than confident in their successes. Sharing in the critique he's rebutting would explain that ambivalence. “In terms of the short-term mentality, the unwillingness to take risks, the way every day is scored like the Super Bowl—all those things he believed, I think, have been confirmed in the extreme,” David Plouffe tells Scheiber. “But it’s not like he was caught by surprise. He understood that. It’s what he expected.”

So why didn't he do more to change it? MORE...

Olbermann: "Facing the public option's demise" (video)

MSNBC-Countdown, video (09:23):

Howie P.S.: Olbermann reviews support for the legislation among progressive legislators. Ezra Klein joins Olbermann to assess the current health of the legislation in the Senate and calls it "the end of the beginning."