Newsweek’s new cover features a picture of President Obama with the headline: “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Author Andrew Sullivan doesn’t regard high unemployment, a terrible economic climate, the president's playing fast and loose with the Constitution, or Mr. Obama's contempt for the role of Congress as intelligent reasons to be critical of Obama.
You can read the piece—which buys the administration’s rhetoric lock stock and barrel (Obama averted a depression, etc.)—but the only really interesting thing about it is the condescension.
Liberals rarely argue nowadays—they just try to make conservatives unappealing by saying that we’re dumb. This endeavor is probably even shallower than that: a troubled magazine’s attempt to generate buzz. (Actually, that is the least offensive aspect, since Newsweek is an old magazine that employs many scribblers.)
Sullivan’s writes that President Obama is playing a “long game” and that he is a brilliant tactician:
Nothing in his first term—including the complicated multiyear rollout of universal health care—can be understood if you do not realize that Obama was always planning for eight years, not four. And if he is reelected, he will have won a battle more important than 2008: for it will be a mandate for an eight-year shift away from the excesses of inequality, overreach abroad, and reckless deficit spending of the last three decades. It will recapitalize him to entrench what he has done already and make it irreversible.
Thanks, Andrew, but most of us have figured this out without you. We know that four more years will make the president's innovations well nigh irreversible. We're not as dumb as you think.