What Your Enemies Say About You: Highest Form of Flattery

     The conservative writer, Marc. A. Thiessen pays the President some pretty high praise I think. He actually makes as good as a case for Obama as any I've seen.

     "I wish more Republicans were like Barack Obama. Really. Give the president his due: he fights for what he believes in. "

     "In his first year in office, Obama faced a popular backlash against his stimulus spending bill and saw a Republican elected to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in a referendum on Obamacare. Yet despite these and other setbacks, the president declared he had no intention of moderating his approach. “The one thing I’m really clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” Obama said in a January 2010 interview. "

    "That attitude is precisely why Obama is a now two-term president."

    "Instead of backing down in the face of a rising tea party movement, Obama doubled down. He knew full well that that the majority of Americans disagreed with Obamacare, but he believed it was the right thing to do. So he rammed it through Congress, passing it over the near-unanimous opposition of the Republican Party and the objections of the American people."

     "Voters rebuked him in the 2010 midterm elections, putting the House in Republican hands. But by 2012, Americans gave Obama a second term in office. Now, Obamacare is the permanent law of the land — and Ted Kennedy’s seat is back in Democratic hands."

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-republicans-should-start-acting-like-obama/2013/01/07/003374b8-58e5-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html

     Mind you, Thiessen then goes on to urge Republicans to hold the nation hostage and be willing to default on the debt ceiling. This points to the weakness of his argument: it's good to stand up for what you believe in, provided you are not delusional and truly are doing things that are good for the nation. Under any circumstances defaulting on the debt ceiling is lunacy.

     Doing so sure won't get the GOP back in power, Still it's largely true what he says about Obama. The President was wiling to put all his capital on something like ObamaCare where there has been so much nay saying about it and some-rather incomprehensibly I think-claiming that focusing on healthcare in the middle of a recession was wrong.

    Most things he has thrown the weight of his office behind he's gotten done, the stimulus, Dodd-Frank, healthcare, raising taxes back to Clinton rates for the rich.

   With all the knocks he's taken from many on the Left, it's a pretty impressive record. It may well look considerably more so in retrospect.

    The thing that Thiessen misses, however, is you do have to have the country behind you. If the GOP did try to really force default-they won't-they might never get back in again.