Washington Post: Public Advocate Gets Obama To Pull Back

September 9, 2009

Dana Milbank gives the liberal major news media perspective on Public Advocate's tireless pace since January to oppose Obama. Mr. Milbank is the top political reporter for the Washington Post and has worked the Supreme Court, White House and Congressional territory for a long time.

(Washington Post, Today September 9)
(Quote) Eugene Delgaudio, a longtime conservative activist in Virginia, had watched with pleasure last month as support for President Obama's health care plan disintegrated at town hall meetings.

He delighted in the forced resignation last week of a White House environmental adviser. And he has celebrated the continued failure of Obama's "socialism" to halt the loss of jobs.

So on Tuesday, Delgaudio made sure he was one of the demonstrators standing outside Wakefield High in Arlington, Va., the scene of Obama's latest trouble: the back-to-school speech that caused a furor even before it happened.

"If he's out there to create the impression that he's making a lot of mistakes, he's doing a good job of it," Delgaudio, holding a banner proclaiming "Mr. President: Stay Away From Our Kids," said. If the last month, he went on, "is a referendum on what kind of president we have, it's going to be like Jimmy Carter, Roman numeral II, on steroids. ... I mean, I don't know how low we can go. Is there more low than this?"

The answer: Probably not. And that's a problem for Delgaudio, who, for all his passion, was one of only a dozen conservatives to brave the rain to demonstrate outside the school. It has been the summer of Obama's discontent - but this does not necessarily mean that his presidency is already heading into its autumn.

The good news for Obama in his bad news is that his problems are mostly self-inflicted: not knowing that "green jobs" czar Van Jones had blamed the government for 9/11, for example, or allowing the Education Department to solicit political help for Obama from America's schoolchildren.

Compared with the worst presidential debacle of recent Augusts, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the failure of health-care reform is little more than a tropical depression. If the economy keeps improving, and if Obama can use tonight's address to Congress to salvage pieces of the health-care proposal, he's likely to regain much of what he lost.

That realization tempered the celebration among the right-wingers. Even Delgaudio, though pronouncing himself reinvigorated after being "too lazy" during Obama's first months, admitted it's premature to declare Obama's problems irreparable.

For now, it was pleasant enough for the conservatives to know that Obama, as he talked to the students across Chesterfield Road, had been temporarily hobbled. The Wakefield speech itself was evidence: Scheduled as an address to the nation's students before it was overtaken by controversy, the talk became an exercise in banality. (unquote)........

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