"Obsession," "daily hypocrisy," "windblown and unprincipled"- a one-time fan now stands shovel-ready for the Obamawake

WASHINGTON -- The most destructive gap for President Obama is not the Republican lead on the generic congressional ballot, or even a job disapproval that has surpassed approval -- it is the gap between aspiration and reality.

The Manhattan mosque controversy showed the problem in compressed form. First came the Obama of high-toned principle (largely the right principle, in my view). Then a politically motivated recalibration. Then a scrambling staff explanation. Then an embarrassed silence, since it is difficult to clarify the clarification of a clarification. Then the president's regretful assertion of "no regrets."

It was more than a lapse. From the firing of Shirley Sherrod, to the obsession with Fox News, to lashing the "professional left," the Obama administration engages in a daily hypocrisy. It attacks the sound and fury of the cable news cycle while being entirely captive to its rhythms. In the process, it often appears reactive, windblown and unprincipled.

This gap between ideals and practice is becoming a defining narrative of the administration. Obama once promised, for example, to end the "divisive food fight in Washington." Apparently there is an exception for sugary, frozen beverages. In his new stump speech, he says: "We're slipping and sliding and sweating, and the other side, the Republicans, they're standing there with their Slurpees watching us." In Seattle, the President of the United States pantomimed drinking a Slurpee to mock his opponents. A campaigner such as Ronald Reagan could draw political blood with a wink and a smile. Obama's partisan rhetoric manages to be prickly, mean-spirited and unfunny. On the campaign trail, he taunts and whines. He does not charm.

But this much can be said: The rhetoric fits the message. Having spent beyond the dreams of Franklin Roosevelt to produce a 9.5 percent unemployment rate, Obama has reached an ideological dead end. His natural policy inclination would be even more stimulus spending, now a political impossibility. So he is left with attacking Republicans. This is a natural political instinct. But it leaves Obama looking like any other beleaguered, partisan politician.

The tensions accumulate. The candidate who pledged to reach across party lines passed his agenda in a steady march of party-line votes and strong-arm legislative maneuvers. The candidate who sought to transcend partisan divisions is viewed in a recent Democracy Corps poll as "too liberal" by 57 percent of likely voters. The candidate who said he would "fundamentally change the way Washington works" has seen public distrust of government grow to pre-French Revolutionary levels.

The failure to change, or even to challenge, the culture of Washington rankles on right and left. Here is Lawrence Lessig writing in The Nation: "Obama will leave the presidency, whether in 2013 or 2017, with Washington essentially intact and the movement he inspired betrayed."

The height of Obama's political fall is measured by how awkward the echoes of his past rhetoric now seem. When he said recently, "Let's reach for hope," it was indeed a stretch. It sounded like an aging pop singer, grown paunchy and out of tune, stumbling through an old favorite. Obama is pursued by the memories of his own promise.

Let's pretend journalists applaud Sherrod threat to sue Breitbart

Shirley Sherrod says she plans to sue conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, the Associated Press reports from San Diego: “Speaking Thursday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, Sherrod said she would definitely sue over the video that took her remarks out of context”:

Sherrod said she had not received an apology from Breitbart and no longer wanted one. “He had to know that he was targeting me,” she said.

Does she have a winning case? Probably not.

For one thing, the alleged defamation (or, to be precise, the defamation that she would allege if she filed suit) took place while she was a public official and involved claims about the performance of her public duties. Thus she would have to meet the rigorous standard, set forth by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), of proving not only that Breitbart published a damaging falsehood about her but that he did so “with ‘actual malice’–that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Even if she proves that Breitbart published false and defamatory statements about her, he wins the case if he did so only negligently.

To put it in layman’s terms, she would have to demonstrate that the falsehood Breitbart published about her–the claim that the video showed “her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions”–was a lie, not just an error. But Breitbart issued a timely correction of this statement, creating a strong presumption against such an allegation. (As to video itself, Breitbart could almost certainly defend it as truthful.)

Blogger William Jacobson notes some other pitfalls for Sherrod of suing Breitbart–the most notable is that if the case went ahead, he would be able to use the discovery process to uncover new information about her and about his other adversaries whose conduct is relevant to the case, namely the NAACP and the Obama administration.

Of course, she hasn’t actually filed a lawsuit, and our guess is that a smart lawyer will advise her against it–and that if she does sue, she will end up settling in exchange for an apology or a more emphatic correction. Her threat to sue, in short, is largely an empty one, even if one can empathize with her feeling of having been wronged by Breitbart.

But one aspect of this story strikes us as passing strange: The venue in which she issued this threat was a convention of journalists. What’s more, someone who was there tells us that when she said she planned to sue, the audience applauded. Our source was careful to note that there were nonjournalists in the audience too (PR men and corporate sponsors). Still, we have to ask: What kind of journalist would applaud the threat of a defamation lawsuit?

Sherrod affair is "a wake-up call for the White House gang..."

By Tina Brown

Shirley Sherrod’s firing isn’t a teachable moment. It was a wake-up call for the White House gang that can’t shoot straight.

Let’s NOT have a conversation about race. The calls for Obama to now make the Shirley Sherrod debacle a teachable moment fills me with panic that the president will retreat to the Oval Office and craft a soaring piece of oratory, instead of getting on with the humdrum business of firing the stumbling, bumbling members of his own team who, as the saying goes, can’t find their ass with either hand.

It doesn’t take much imagination to know how much the president must have seethed to be derailed from his policy agenda by this Republican attack mutt, Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart’s genre of dirty tricks were old news even in the Whitewater era. Public figures know from the daily incinerated reputations that any time you open your mouth near a Twitter feed, your career can go up in smoke. It remains amazing that USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack didn’t even accord Shirley Sherrod the kind of pause a minor executive in a corporate human resources department would have felt obliged to offer and have someone—anyone—listen to the full tape of Sherrod’s NAACP speech or even read the text.

When Obama heralds another “teachable moment,” it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.

But Obama can’t keep doing catch-up up outrage two media cycles after the fact. On the campaign trail, he was the chief executive of a laser-guided, on-message apparatus, the candidate who seemed to lead from a head that was always the most level of the people round him. Instead, he sounds as out of it as his old adversary John McCain when he said on Good Morning America that “we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” Yeah, right. There is something loose and jittery about the atmosphere round Obama at the moment of which Vilsack's clumsy over-reaction gives us a whiff.

It’s as if inside the White House the belief in Obama’s inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it’s a startling revelation.

Victim Shirley Sherrod initiated legal action, the Pigford Farms case, that yielded millions for a bankrupt commune she coowned

...the Pigford Farms case is a class-action lawsuit filed against the federal government on behalf of black farmers and black wannabe farmers, who say they were discriminated against in loan proceedings. The federal government settled Pigford Farms for an unbelievable $1.15 billion. An incredibly high percentage of those receiving awards under this settlement have done so fraudulently.

Shirley Sherrod was not only an initiator of the Pigford Farms case, she received a chunk of change for her company, New Communities, Inc. To be accurate, she received the largest chunk of change for New Communities — $13 million. New Communities was a bankrupt commune-type land trust held by Sherrod and her husband. She and her husband personally received $150,000 each to compensate them for “pain and suffering.”