Weigel

The Wrong Way to Hate the Left

What’s a good way for Robert Gibbs to spend his day? Obviously, whining about the treatment the White House gets from the “professional left.”

They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality… They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.

What’s a good way for the Professional Left to spend its day? Obviously, ripping into Gibbs. They’re on the right track, too, because it’s really not clear who Gibbs is talking about. Who are the liberal commentators or activists who refuse to give the White House credit for its big progressive bills? Jane Hamsher, David Sirota, Ed Schultz, maybe the editors of The Progressive . Among all liberals , the White House has soaring, 85 percent, Chavez-when-oil-is-expensive popularity. So the fight being picked is with a noisy crowd that doesn’t speak for the base. Seriously, now – even MoveOn is going easy on the White House, edging away from anti-war activism and toward anti-corporate activism. That’s quite a solid it’s doing for Obama, whom its members endorsed in 2008 in large part over the war issue.

Another thing: I always thought the Obama campaign was clever to locate operations in Chicago. We all thought this was clever. David Plouffe told us it was. Has Gibbs already forgotten how faint the din of cable news is, once you drive past Front Royal or over the Bay Bridge? It’s very faint! Liberals are still opening wallets for the DNC! Almost none of them oppose the health care bill! This is like obsessively responding to and hectoring the anonymous commenters who keep posting the same links on your blog.