In a way the two articles — one by Jon Chait about why liberals are unhappy with President Obama and one by David Frum about why conservatives are unhappy with President Obama — are bookends.  Both are writing about how the most extreme elements of the party they identify have left the mainstream behind.

But in another way they are very different pieces.  Chait’s liberals are pie-in-the-sky-dreamers who are disappointed that President Obama doesn’t just wave his magic wand to get things done — they don’t understand the rules of American politics that limit what a president can do and they won’t be satisfied with less than a full slate of liberal reform.  They are doomed to disappointment as the world they live in fails to measure up to their ideals.  The biggest danger they pose is to themselves and their fellow Democrats as their search for a progressive savior may very well mean that the pragmatic Democrat they put in the White House serves only one term.

Frum argues that conservatives, on the other hand, have lost touch with reality.  A committed Republican, he nonetheless argues that members of his party’s base today are simply delusional — they aren’t disappointed in the world in the same way that liberals are because in a very real sense they live in a different world altogether. Their refusal to accept the facts that govern our lives mean that they pose a danger to all of us — in their willingness to let the US default on its loans, for instance, or their refusal to entertain any increases in revenue in the quest to balance the budget.

One conclusion from reading these two articles is that it is a false equivalence to say that both parties have a similar problem with the radical element of their bases.  As David Frum himself would argue, the consequences of the radicalization of the American right are more severe and far-reaching than the consequences of the American left. Chait is exasperated by the extremists in his party; Frum is worried by the extremes in his.

For more on Frum, see the Profile in Citizenship in the KTR chapter on Parties for our interview with David Frum.  We picked the former Bush speechwriter for our profile because despite his frustration with the current state of his party, he remains loyal to it and steadfastly believes that if he hangs on long enough, the party will cycle back to him and its original principles.

Edited to add — there is a lot of talk today about Rick Perry’s bad “brain freeze” last night.  Smart journalist James Fallows has a collection of other classic and memorable debate moments here.  Worth watching!!

Ohio voters defeated State Bill 5, a law championed by Republican governor John Kasich, which would have ended collective bargaining rights for public employees like cops, firefighters and teachers.

Mississippi voters defeated a constitutional amendment that would have changed the definition of the word “person” in their state constitution to include a fertilized embryo. This would have had the effect of banning abortion and likely banning many forms of birth control as well.

There will no doubt be good things to read about these results during the day and I will add any I think especially worthwhile.  In the meantime, read the New York Times here and here.  Why do the authors of these pieces think that these elections tell us something about the national political mood?  What do they think it means?

That means, if Congress wants to block the president, it generally can.  The efforts of the Republicans in the Senate to keep President Obama’s popular jobs bill from coming to a vote are a case in point.  Using a filibuster, a minority of senators has managed to block even a debate over the bill and over one of its key provisions which would have employed 400,000 teachers and firefighters. The Republicans have decided that their electoral fortunes in 2012 are improved if Obama looks weak, so they want to keep him from claiming any political victories.

So it was surprising that last week brought a couple of foreign policy successes for the Obama administration – Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, was killed, helping to validate Obama’s much derided “leading from behind” strategy, and the president announced that he would be bringing troops home from Iraq on schedule, by the end of this year.  This is on top of last spring’s killing of Osama bin Laden.  Jon Chait, who writes for New York Magazine, has a good piece on Obama’s unexpected rise as a foreign policy president.

The essence of Chait’s argument is that Obama looks strong in foreign policy, because he can act on his own.  He looks weaker on domestic policy because much of what he wants to do requires congressional action and the Republican majority in the House and the Republican minority in the Senate (through the filibuster) can block that.

Well aware of this, and realizing that the jobs bill is dead, the White House has decided to try a different tactic, taking smaller steps that the president can take alone on the domestic front, relying on executive orders, regulatory moves, and executive-branch agency actions.  They won’t have the impact that the jobs bill would have but the administration is hopeful that these steps will be better than taking no action at all.  The New York Times reports it here.

Is this current scenario what the founders had in mind when they created the limited tool box of the American president?

As we explain in Chapter 15 of KTR, there is no much reason to think that there really is an ideological bias in the media today, but a new study by the Pew Research Center casts that into some doubt.  They found that negative coverage of President Obama outweighs the positive by a ration of 4 to 1, making coverage of him far more negative than that of any of the contenders for the Republican nomination.

Why do you think that is?