Noah Rothman:
As an outgrowth of the dispute over the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, liberal Democrats have demonstrated that Barack Obama is every bit the lame duck his predecessors were at this point in their presidencies.
The president spent much of the winter exploiting the weakness and disunity of the congressional GOP in order to demonstrate that he was still the master of his own destiny. That edifice collapsed amid the start of the 2016 campaign cycle.
Today, Barack Obama’s most dangerous adversaries occupy his side of the aisle. As the president seeks expanded authority to negotiate a free trade agreement with America’s Asian partners, he has met unexpected resistance to this proposal from Democrats. In his effort to compel his left flank to drop their objections to this trade agreement, the president has relied almost exclusively on his diminished cult of personality to compel progressive submission.
“If you were watching MSNBC and all this stuff, you’re thinking, ‘Man, I love Obama, but what’s going on?’” Obama said on MSNBC. While this is perhaps an accurate appraisal of the average MSNBC viewer’s internal monologue, it’s a touch unseemly for the president to so callously expose the liberal cable news network’s flagrant biases while he is its guest.
“When people say this trade deal is bad for working families, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” the petulant president continued in this week’s multilateral interview with, among others, MSNBC host Chris Matthews.
Obama went on to note that he finds it objectionable that so many of his erstwhile progressive allies refuse to defer to his better judgment and assume that he has their best interests at heart:
“Think about it. I’ve spent the last six and half years yanking this economy out of the worst recession since the great depression. Every single thing I’ve done from the Affordable Care Act to pushing to raise the minimum wage to making sure that young people are able to go to college and get good job training to what we’re pushing now in terms of sick pay leave,” Obama said. “Everything I do has been focused on how do we make sure the middle class is getting a fair deal.”
“Now I would not be doing this trade deal if I did not think it was good for the middle class. And when you hear folks make a lot of suggestions about how bad this trade deal is, when you dig into the facts they are wrong,” Obama said.
Scorned, the president took his anti-progressive message where he is the most comfortable: A campaign setting. In a speech to those remaining parishioners who populate OFA’s ever-thinning pews, the president scolded his party’s activist class for – no joke – centering their campaign against the TPP on empty rhetoric.
I can top this.
HILL-ARIOUS: Bill Clinton’s Wife Condemns ‘Scourge Of Sexual Assault’ In First Big Speech
How tone deaf are Dems?
Can they not hear the hypocrisy as their words come out of their mouths?
… the kettle said to the pot.