As I’ve been noting of late, E. J. Dionne has been mounting a vigorous, if entirely unpersuasive, defense of liberalism and the administration. He’s been writing that liberalism isn’t wrong — about anything – it’s just that an unfair and dangerous conservative “narrative” continues to gain traction. Perhaps in an effort to change things up a bit, he’s trying something different today. He writes that liberalism isn’t wrong, it’s just that an unfair conservative narrative has gained traction. Oh wait, it’s the same thing again.

He writes (emphasis mine):

Underlying so much of the political analysis pouring forth over the Massachusetts showdown is a debate about the reasons for the decline of Obama’s popularity from the heights of last spring.
Conservatives blame “liberalism” — big government, big deficits, an overly ambitious health-care plan, a stimulus that spent too much and other supposedly left-leaning sins of the Obama regime.
The right is especially taken with the movement of political independents from guarded sympathy for the Democrats to outright opposition. Much of the analysis of Scott Brown’s unexpectedly strong run for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat focuses on the Republican’s strength among independent voters said to be alarmed over the ambition and reach of Obamaism.
Obama sympathizers counter that the president’s approval ratings are quite healthy in light of an unemployment rate over 10 percent and a nearly unprecedented destruction of personal wealth.
The conservatives’ focus on ideology, they say, is an opportunistic way of distracting attention from the mistakes of the Bush years and the role conservative policies played in bringing us to this point. To cite ideology rather than the economy in explaining the poll numbers is like analyzing the causes of Civil War without any reference to slavery or the rise of the New Deal without mention of the Great Depression.
It’s not surprising that I lean toward the second set of explanations, and I wish my conservative friends would be as honest as the Republican investor was in acknowledging that presiding over bad times always hurts the party stuck with the job.
But the success of the conservative narrative ought to trouble liberals and the Obama administration. The president has had to “own” the economic catastrophe much earlier than he should have. Most Americans understand that the mess we are in started before Obama got to the White House. Yet many, especially political independents, are upset that the government has had to spend so much and that things have not turned around as fast as they had hoped.

What is so unbelievably ludicrous here is, well, everything. Consider the quotation marks around “liberalism” as if there is some wonderful, efficient, empirical, successful liberalism that has nothing to do with big government and the other “suppodely left-leaning sins of the Obama administration.” I keep hearing about this liberalism. My question is: Why do liberals always keep this super-duper-perfect-wonderful liberalism under wraps? Where is it? What does it look like? Why are conservatives always describing this non-liberalism E. J. refers to? Why are voters making their decisions based on this faux liberalism? Please: Show us the good liberalism E. J. says all real liberals believe in and that Americans so desperately want.

Moving on, what’s that “supposedly” even about? Is the Obama “regime” not left-leaning? Whither does it lean, if not leftward?

And has the Obama administration not been about big deficits and big government? Is any negative description of the Obama administration merely part of that fraudulent conservative “narrative”?

E. J.’s larger defense is simply a strawman. Of course, conservatives acknowledge that some of Obama’s problems stem from a bad economy. Indeed, central to the conservative critique of Obamaism is that he has pursued a leftwing agenda at odds with the needs of an economy on the ropes.

Random question: What good is liberalism if it only works when the economy is good?

Again: E. J. says that Obama “has had to ‘own’ the economic catastrophe much earlier than he should have. Most Americans understand that the mess we are in started before Obama got to the White House. Yet many, especially political independents, are upset that the government has had to spend so much and that things have not turned around as fast as they had hoped.”

Well, yeah, exactly. Obama has come to own the economy because he’s devoted his first year to owning it. The stimulus was supposed to do X but ended up doing far, far less than X while hiking up the deficit and spending money on stuff that has nothing to do with stimulating the economy. The health-care bill will do nothing to get the economy moving, even it’s a good bill (which it ain’t). The unfair conservative narrative is by and large an accurate description of reality. And, because independents see that reality, they’re aligning themselves with conservatives. They’re not all dupes.

The only people sporting a narrative at odds with reality are the president’s biggest supporters, including Dionne. It’s their liberalism that deserves to be in quotation marks, because it’s fictional. Conservatives — heh — are the ones living in the reality-based community, as it were.