AP: Anti-Obama brickbats from left as well as right

[ProSense]

Anti-Obama brickbats from left as well as right

by Jitendra Joshi

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Opposition to President Barack Obama from Republicans is being augmented by pushback from his own Democrats as he takes on some liberal sacred cows.

There is grumbling from Obama's left flank against tax proposals in his ambitious budget, against his plans for a new military offensive in Afghanistan and over his stance towards the trade union movement.

"He has the classic task of the reformer, to get enough momentum up to overcome the inertial resistance of the status quo," Brookings Institution analyst William Galston said, identifying resistance from both left and right.

Obama Tuesday targeted one of the most powerful constituencies in the sprawling Democratic coalition -- the teachers unions.

"It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones," he said in a speech promising a world-class education system throughout the United States.

That raised the prospect of merit pay based on performance for better teachers, and dismissal for sub-par educators -- notions that have long been anathema to the National Education Association union.

Obama received scattered boos when he broached those ideas in a speech last year to the NEA, which with about 3.2 million members is the nation's biggest union for teachers.

link

[dcindian]

1. I am proud that we on the left are not lock step.

I have not yet witnessed a situation where millions in lock step and unquestioning has led to anything but the negative.

[camera obscura]

2. It must be shocking to the MSM that there are more than two sides in the political world

The Republicans spent the last eight years crushing internal dissent and look where it got them: they're a caricature of an ideology.

[WI_DEM]

3. Somebody I know told me recently that "Obama is doing okay because he has

the far right up in arms as well as the far left."

[mkultra]

4. This just adds to his mainstream acceptability

For the great mass in the middle who feel that the far right and left are out of touch, this makes him look like a middle road moderate.

[NYC_SKP]

5. To me, that means he's doing it right.

Because, heaven knows, the left has it's share of wacko fundamentalist head-in-the-sand opinions.

Sometimes I think it has far more than it's share! :evilgrin:

Nice post, recommended.

[wyldwolf]

6. "Blessed Are The PeaceMakers, For They Shall Catch Hell From Both Sides"

"Blessed Are The PeaceMakers, For They Shall Catch Hell From Both Sides"
- Sign on the wall of the Justice Department office of Burke Marshall.

--------

"I am a man who believes with all fervor and intensity in moderate progress. Too often men who believe in moderation believe in it only moderately and tepidly and leave fervor to the extremists of the two sides -- the extremists of reaction and the extremists of progress. Washington, Lincoln . . . are men who, to my mind, stand as the types of what wide, progressive leadership should be."
—Theodore Roosevelt

"I was no party man myself, and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them."
—George Washington

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
—Thomas Jefferson

"Just as Lincoln got contradictory advice from the extremists of both sides . . . so now I have to guard myself against the extremists of both sides."
—Theodore Roosevelt

"We stand in the presence of an awakened nation, impatient of partisan make-believe."
—Woodrow Wilson

"The future lies with those wise political leaders who realize that the great public is interested more in Government than in politics. The growing independence of voters, after all, has been proven by the votes in every Presidential election since my childhood and the tendency, frankly, is on the increase."
—Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Extremes to the right and left of any political dispute are always wrong."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Extreme opposites resemble the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead."
—John F. Kennedy

"When we put aside partisanship, embrace the best ideas regardless of where they come from and work for principled compromise, we can move America not left or right, but forward."
—Bill Clinton

"The choice we offer is not conservative or liberal. In many ways its not even Republican or Democratic. Its different. Its new. And it will work."
—Bill Clinton

[Cha]

7. Yes, we got us a

real president, this time.