My must read of the day is "The Obama Paradox," in Politico:
At one point, Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska thrust at the president "reams of stuff" to make his case. "I had print screenshots of computer pages," he said. "I said, 'This is all screwed up. Why aren't we fixing this?'" Speaking of Obama, Begich added, "What he understood was what they had done, election candidate or not, it had hurt everybody."
According to several participants, Begich and his colleagues demanded to know how committed Obama was to fighting for the Senate majority. Obama was known as a fierce competitor when his name was on the ballot, not so much when it was not.
"I don't really care to be president without the Senate,'' Obama said, according to attendees, signaling that he knew the health care debacle created resentment among Democrats and that he wanted to make amends.
That was a devastating comedown from only a year earlier.
This is an excerpt of the first section in a long profile by Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein at Politico.
The article, as the title suggests, depicts an incongruent president struggling to define his legacy as he makes his way through his second term and apparently the dinner parties that go with it. Parties that are comprised of "outsiders," where he gets to discuss art and life—discussions, we learn, President Obama prefers to politics (though he is working on connecting more with members of Congress and inviting them to some outings).
Just as Brown and Epstein detail a new Obama, pledging to help keep Democrats in control of the Senate, a few paragraphs later we are reminded of a coming EPA proposal that would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions in existing power plants by 30 percent over the next 16 years. The move has been called the "the strongest actions ever taken by the United States government to fight climate change."
Those two plans don't fit together.
Much of the president's recent work on climate change—be it this new proposal or the delayed Keystone pipeline—greatly hurts the most vulnerable, red state Democrats. If Obama's goal is to "not hurt everyone" and to keep the Senate in November, going further left on climate issues, which are not well received in states such as Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, and Louisiana, isn't the route to take.
Is it a paradox or just narcissism coupled with insincere promises of convenience?