She writes:

Two stories about President Obama this weekend pushed my growing unease with his recent moves into full-blown anxiety. They come on the heels of Tim Dickinson’s devastating Rolling Stone piece laying out concrete problems with Obama’s response to the BP oil spill – from delays in cleaning up the Minerals Management Service, distrusting scientists who correctly reported the spill was much bigger than BP said, and waiting more than a week to declare the crisis “an Oil Spill of National Significance,” which corralled new services. Maybe the most damning section of Dickinson’s piece comes when he quotes the president proudly announcing he’d reversed his stand against offshore oil drilling. “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” the president said. “They are technologically very advanced.” Dickenson notes: “Eighteen days later, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the Deepwater Horizon rig went off like a bomb.”
Of the weekend’s worrisome Obama stories, the first was Politico’s Roger Simon’s interview with Obama, published in full today, in which his self-defense about how he’s handled the BP oil disaster sounded whiny and juvenile, and raised big questions about whether he’s capable of fighting the battles he needs to enter and win to move the country forward. The other was Matt Bai’s “Democrat in Chief?” in the New York Times Magazine, which showed that Obama and his team seem more focused on protecting the “brand” that they believe galvanized millions of new voters, young voters and independents in 2008, to potentially realign American politics, than with helping Democrats hold the House and Senate.
On that point, quickly: I don’t have a problem with the president focusing on the big picture, concentrating on government, to the neglect of partisan political duties. If he were working on programs and policies that he thought would resonate with those new and/or unaligned voters who backed him two years ago, I’d be perfectly fine. What worries me is the White House’s relatively substance-free approach to keeping the Obama brand bright and shiny. Bai argues that Obama’s team sees “inclusivity, transcendence, a generational break from stale dogmas” as the so-called brand – and there’s nothing in that notion that has anything to do with actual political programs, policies or problem solving. That’s a little terrifying. Republicans succeeded for most of the last 40 years because they delivered on many of their promises to their base, especially big business, with tax cuts, deregulation and demagoguery against government. Democrats have stumbled in that period because they haven’t done the same. Could Obama ultimately hurt the Democratic Party more than he helped it?

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