Shockingly, Morning Joe Transcript Actually Worth Five Minutes of Your Time

But only five minutes.

Down on Obama, and that includes the liberals, who are beginning to get as distracted and depressed as he is, over the burden of having to spin his failures.

Video at the link, but here's some good parts. All emphases added.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Tina, what has happened to this president, the president from hope and change? What has happened?

TINA BROWN: Well it's so interesting. I think that Obama doesn't like his job, actually. I think that he is genuinely of a professioral disposition in the sense that I think that he's interested in chewing over the pros and cons, and he doesn't like, he doesn't like power and he doesn't know how to exercise power.

This is spinning for failure, of course -- trying to cast Obama's failures in the most laudatory ways possible -- but still, strip that away, and it's still acknowledging failure that must be spun.

[BROWN, CONTINUING:] And I think knowing how to exercise power is absolutely crucial. He doesn't understand how to underpin his ideas with the political gritty, granular business of getting it done. And that kind of gap has just widened and widened and widened. And so that every time there is a moment, a window where he can jump in, like something like a Simpson-Bowles as well, he just doesn't do it. He hangs back at crucial moments when you have to dive through that window.

This is Tina Freakin' Brown.

SCARBOROUGH: And regardless of your ideology, it is very safe to say, I think most people would agree: LBJ he is not, Bill Clinton, he is not, when it just comes to understanding how to make Washington work.

MIKE BARNICLE: It appears off of what Tina just said, you just said, it appears that you could make a case that Barack Obama doesn't like politics.

BROWN: Right. I absolutely feel that.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Well who would today? I mean, I think it's great that --

SCARBOROUGH: Oh come on. If you don't like medicine, don't be a doctor. If you don't like politics, don't put yourself out there to run the free world, Mika.

BRZEZINSKI: You know what? Politics today need to be changed.

SCARBOROUGH: Stop the apologizing!

BRZEZINSKI: I'm not apologizing.

SCARBOROUGH: You're apologizing. [Sarcastically imitates Mika's voice] Who would like politics today? You know what?

BRZEZINSKI: Who would?

SCARBOROUGH: He is running the free world. He better know a lot of people love politics. Bill Clinton loves politics. FDR loved politics. Ronald Reagan loved politics. Great leaders love what they do. So who would love politics?

BROWN: Isn't it really also about, well the other word for politics is just doing what it takes to get it done. Like, one of the things that's interesting about Obama is that he kind of, and I think he does believe in this, that his idea of being a transformative figure who can cross many persuasions and orientations and aisles. And yet when it is actually taken to reaching out and really bringing that in, and trying, I don't think that it really --

Although Tina Brown never completes the thought, it seems like she's headed towards the idea of, "Obama has a false sense of his abilities and temperament."

Joe Scarborough completes the thought, which he really shouldn't have done. But then, that's why his "expanded" radio program did not in fact return to crush the competition that's so afraid of the scary one-two combination of Joe and Mika.

SCARBOROUGH: He doesn't do that.

JON MEACHAM: The analogy to 1979 is something we should explore a little bit more, for all the obvious reasons: a technocratic president who thinks he's really smart and perhaps above it all. And a slightly unsettled Republican field. Sounds somewhat familiar.

SCARBOROUGH: It does sound familiar.

Jon Meacham, former editor of Newsweek and ridiculous liberal, is also noting that Obama thinks he's really smart and perhaps above it all. In 2008, of course, that crucial word -- "thinks" -- would not have been part of this sentence.

The spin being offered is "Obama is too smart and too full of goodwill to actually be good at politics." That is certainly not new; we've been hearing that for years.

But the new stuff liberals are tentatively adding is that he just "hangs back," "doesn't understand," "thinks" he is truly an important figure. Amid the spin, something closer to the truth reluctantly emerges.

How about "Obama has never had a position of genuine responsibility before in his life?" How about "Obama believes in false ideas which should not be believed?"

Okay, they'll never admit that last one. Because at the end of the day the spin will always be "The ideas are sound, we had a bad messenger/exectuor."

Not even Lord God King Barack will escape the blame if things should come crashing down around him.

Liberalism never fails. Liberals just fail liberalism sometime.

posted by Ace at 04:23 PM

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