Barack Obama's Opening Drive

Camille Paglia get's snarky on Barack Obama's amateur fumbles in the opening drive of his administration:

Free Barack!

Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons - his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.

Read the whole thing here.

A picture of Ms. Paglia is here (accompanied by a flirting reference to Paglia's Rule 5 possiblities).

How about Elizabeth Drew? Is she Rule 5 material? I ask because Ms. Drew's got a new essay up at the New York Review, "The Thirty Days of Barack Obama." She's liberal, but I always enjoy reading her essays. This passage on the early GOP opposition to the administration is worth quoting:

The House Republicans, greatly reduced by the 2006 and 2008 elections, were now as a whole more conservative than they've been in a generation—moderate Republicans having been reduced to a mere dozen or so. There were signs from the outset that the Republicans had no intention of cooperating with Obama. Lacking the leverage to affect policy, or the votes sufficient to defeat Obama's stimulus plan, they could do what they wanted, however short-sighted, without being saddled with responsibility for killing it. Moreover, they concluded from their losses in 2008 that they hadn't been conservative enough; they had come under a great deal of criticism for having presided over too much spending. The House has been particularly polarized for decades: when each party gains the majority, it takes revenge for having been, as they see it, mistreated by the other. Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushing the bill through the House, it was easy for Republican leaders to get their followers worked up against it. Emotion —over issues, over procedure—plays a larger part in parliamentary politics than people may realize.

Almost all the House Republicans come from conservative districts and hold safe seats. And in the House and the Senate, Republicans could, and did, resort to the often successful ruse of saying that they voted against the bill not because they were against what it's trying to do—heavens no—but because it wasn't good enough. The Republicans believed that they were taking no great gamble in opposing the stimulus bill: they figured—perhaps mistakenly—that since the 2010 election was far off, their votes would likely be forgotten. (The Democrats are already running ads against some of them.) They also figured that if the economy began to recover by then, Obama would get all the credit anyway. So, two hours before the new president was to go to the exceptional length of traveling to Capitol Hill to meet with the House Republicans to discuss the stimulus bill, Minority Leader John Boehner sent word to his ranks to oppose it.

Drew's the ultimate Washington insider, and she provides a glimpse into the inner workings of West Wing (President Obama "restlessly roams" the White House, checking in with staffers to see how things are going; and he's a delegator, which means "the boys" are running the place, like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Advisor David Axelrod).

I'll have more later ...