Categorical Aperitif

Hey, look: Not a week before the Obama Administration decided to rag on the troop-hating, Canadian-healthcare-loving, perpetually unsatisfied professional leftists tromping through its imagination, Robert Reich reviewed the administration's achievements and had this to say:

Reasonable people disagree about whether these initiatives should have been more or less ambitious, but almost everyone falls into one of these camps. And that’s precisely the political problem Democrats now face.

A stimulus too small to significantly reduce unemployment, a TARP that didn’t trickle down to Main Street, financial reform that doesn’t fundamentally restructure Wall Street, and health-care reforms that don’t promise to bring down health-care costs have all created an enthusiasm gap. They’ve fired up the right, demoralized the left, and generated unease among the general population.

This leaves the Democrats in a difficult position. They have to prove a negative proposition—that although these initiatives cost lots of money or require many new regulations, conditions would be or will be a lot worse without them.

And faced with this problem, they chose to slap around Dennis Kucinich. Real confidence-builder, that.