Dan Halper has an amazing video from Denmark. It’s three minutes long, but I wouldn’t waste your time if it wasn’t awesome.

(And stick until the very end, when the Danish guy really twists the knife.)

The left has spent a lot of time spinning its wheels the last two weeks arguing about why Obama’s presidency is such a failure. The dominant arguments seem to be: (1) He’s not liberal enough; (2) He’s liberal enough, but he’s not a dirty enough fighter; (3) His failings are temperamental–he doesn’t emote, connect, use the bully pulpit, etc.

All three of these arguments are the standard-issue failure rationalizations of politics. They’re basically what conservatives and Republicans said in 1992 and 1996, what liberals and Democrats said in 2004, and, most recently, what conservatives and Republicans said in 2008. The key difference is that in the Republican version of this argument, there’s usually a bitter debate between factions arguing that the candidate would have won if only he’d been more conservative or less conservative–depending on the viewpoint of the pundit making the argument. I haven’t seen any Dems arguing that Obama’s problem is that he’s been too liberal. Otherwise, both sides think they only loose because they’re too pure and the other guys are too mean. And for whatever reason, people love arm-chair psychologizing presidents, as if demeanor trumps policy completely. None of these rationalizations for Obama’s failures are particularly illuminating.

But a couple things strike me.

First, it’s odd that Democrats suddenly find the debt ceiling fight to be the sine qua non of liberal principles. Because when you jump up to 30,000 feet, Obama’s liberal accomplishments have been pretty impressive:

* He passed a giant healthcare law, giving the left much–though by no means all–of what it wanted. He did this in the face of bipartisan opposition; spent enormous political capital on it; and has suffered very steep political consequences as a result. It’s hard to square his bruising, year-long campaign for Obamacare with the contention that Obama compromises too much and doesn’t like to fight.

* He presided over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He didn’t push the button himself, but he made sure it happened.

* He has generally expanded the role of government.

As a top-line list of accomplishments, that’s not bad. But it doesn’t include the Big One: Obama has laid the groundwork to end both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, regardless of the consequences. Once upon a time, these wars were the single most important thing in Democratic politics.

Yes, I understand that from the Democratic perspective, Obama hasn’t ended them fast enough. Yes, he continued the presence in Iraq longer than they would have liked. But realistically speaking, of the three people who could have become president in 2008–Obama, Clinton, or McCain–Obama is the only one who would have gotten us to the point we’re at now in those two conflicts. He hasn’t been as liberal as many Democrats would like, but he has been much, much more dovish than Clinton or McCain would have been. It seems like that should count for quite a lot.

(And I understand that liberals could make a list of complaints about action items Obama didn’t deliver on–warrantless wiretaps, the Bush tax cuts, Gitmo, etc. I’m simply making the case that they ought to be, if not ecstatic, then quietly pleased with what they’ve gotten from him.)

So what good rationalizations are there to be made for Obama? (That is, if you discount the conservative critique, which I assume most liberals do.) I think there are two, though I haven’t seen any liberals making them.

(1) Obama is a hostage to events. By any measure, the last 36 months have been brutal for the entire world. Obama’s the president, not King of the Markets, and the U.S. is suffering not just from entitlement bloat, but from a financial crisis and a housing collapse, the latter of which could take decades to work out. On top of that, Europe is a complete disaster and even in the best of times, would be a drag on the world economy. On top of that, China has its own housing problems, not to mention looming demographic catastrophe. No president, pursuing any other set of policies, could have reasonably expected much better results than we’re seeing now.

(2) Obama is not a very good president. For whatever reason–strategic foolishness, political naivete, or maybe he’s just not that bright–Obama simply isn’t very good at the job. He loses control of issues by handing process off to Congress (Obamacare); he miscalculates political advantage (not passing his own debt ceiling increase because he wanted to hang this one on the Republicans); he just doesn’t have the skills/instincts/intelligence/take your pick to perform the job ably.

If I were a Democratic partisan, I’d be making the case for (1) now, and then for (2) after he loses the election. They’re both more helpful to the movement than the standard trio of rationalizations.

One final note: Jonathan Chait makes a case for something like (1) in this piece, where he argues that Obama still has a perfectly clear path to victory in 2012. I agree, to some extent. A sitting president always has a puncher’s chance. And Obama will have to run an insurgent campaign, as Chait suggests. (Though the fact that Team Obama spent part of this week trying to torpedo Mitt Romney tells you something about how smart they aren’t. Forget the current polling: Romney is the most beatable Republican in the field. He’s terrible at retail politics, has a glass jaw, and would not be able to take advantage of the two big issues–Obamacare and jobs–because of his “accomplishments” as governor and job-killer at Bain Capital. Team Obama should be doing anything they can to help Romney get the nomination. The fact that they misunderstand the nature of their Republican challengers ought to be really unsettling to down-ticket Dems.)

What I would caution Chait from doing, however, is putting too much stock in Obama’s base approval numbers. As a statistical matter, they’re skewed by the enormous disparity between black approval and everyone else. Which means that even if black voters turn out like everyone else (not often the case) in swing-states where blacks make up less than the national average (WI, IN, for starters) he’ll be at a much greater disadvantage than his approval numbers show.

(Also, this assumes there’s not Bradley Effect in approval surveys. I’m not sure I’d believe that.)

For those of you keeping score, the third most damaging thing to happen to Obama’s reelect prospects this week was the undertones of the NYT Drew Westin story suggesting that Obama isn’t as smart as we thought coupled with the overtones of Bret Stephens’s WSJ piece this morning. Why are these two data points dangerous for Obama? Because the end logic of the narrative they create leads to the Third Rail of his presidency: affirmative action.

I’m not sure how I’d defuse this if I was David Axlerod. My guess is that I’d go pretty much what they’ve done from the beginning: Trust that America is too racially sensitive to allow itself to even contemplate having those thoughts. (At least until December 2012.)

Watching Obama try to talk up the American economy as the Dow tanked 635 points was pretty hysterical–because it was so entirely predictable.

Creigh Deeds.

Martha Coakley.

Jon Corzine.

The Chicago Olympics.

The Copenhagen Climate talks.

The 2010 House Democrats.

And now we can add America’s 401K accounts to the list of items our president’s magnificent oratory has worked its magic on.

WRM has a very carefully constructed piece up about race in America. It’s a good essay and I hope it’s not reductionist to sum it up as saying something like this: There’s lots of anti-white violence being committed by young black people this summer and it may (or may not) mean something larger, but it risks a backlash from white America.

Again, that’s just a crude summary and WRM is worth reading in full.

One data point I’d very much like to see him incorporate into his thesis is Obama’s share of the white vote in 2008, both in the primaries and in the general election. In the general election, his share of the white vote in a given district corresponded negatively with black population. Which is to say, the more black voters in a district, the lower Obama’s percentage of the white vote. The data on this for the general election was put together by Todd Donovan at Western Washington University.

I suppose the natural explanation for this would be the endemic racism of McCain voters. Except that this was pretty much the pattern we saw with purely Democratic electorates in the primaries. Obama would clean up among whites in areas where there were no black voters, but lose whites in racially mixed areas. I haven’t seen an academic work-up on this (though one may be out there), but it was the elephant in the room during the ’08 primary season. Totally unmentionable.

I’m not sure what it means. It’s entirely possible that it means nothing at all–that the differences are explicable by other cross-tabs (say, that the voters in all-white Democratic precincts tended to be young voters, Ph.D. voters, and wealthy voters–groups Obama did great with everywhere).

But it seems interesting enough to pick up and at least examine a bit. I’d love to know what Prof. Mead makes of it.

James Taranto does terrible, unspeakable things to Jacob Weisberg. Someone should have stopped this fight:

To Weisberg, the failures of the Obama administration prove not only that Republicans are “intellectual primitives” but that you are stupid: Among the “sobering lessons” that “we” have “learned,” he writes, is “that there’s no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people.”

The FT, by the way, is a London-based newspaper with a far-flung world-wide circulation (though it is smaller than The Wall Street Journal’s by an order of magnitude). So when Weisberg says you’re stupid, he isn’t exactly saying it to your face. Remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? We suppose the definitions are flexible here. Bad-mouthing the American people–for dissenting!–is the highest form of patriotism, at least this week.

Weisberg criticizes Obama, too, but only in a backhanded way. “The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed,” Weisberg sobs. “A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president.” (News you can use: Always sleep on your side and you’ll wake up uneaten.)

This all reminded us of another Weisberg piece, published in 2008. Back then, he was much more enthusiastic about the “handsome, brilliant, and cool” Sen. Obama, whose policies, Weisberg claimed, even those who disagreed with them were obliged to acknowledge constituted “serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face.”

But Weisberg’s attitude toward the American people, if not as openly hostile as it is today, was characterized by a deep suspicion. Obama was not doing as well in the polls as Weisberg thought he should have been, given the all-around awesomeness of the junior senator from Illinois. If Obama lost to John McCain, it could mean only one thing: America was irredeemably racist. (As we noted at the time, in reaching this conclusion Weisberg committed a rookie error of logic, which makes today’s pompous pronouncements about “science” all the more hilarious.)

Weisberg’s latest amounts to a lament for democracy. Even if the American people aren’t as racist as he suspected you were back in 2008, you aren’t up to the challenge of being governed by the handsome, brilliant and cool Barack Obama.

And then he gets around to taking after Obama. Cue the Super Mario Bros. magic star music.

This story about Rick Perry being a C (and D) student at Texas A&M is pretty great.

That is, it’s great because it means that if Perry wins, it will be completely in bounds for his surrogates to ask–over and over and over, if necessary–for President Obama’s college and law school transcripts. In fact, Perry should preemptively release his SATs, since Obama’s SAT and LSAT scores are even more interesting.

Much of the left has devolved into rationalizing (or worse) about Obama, Boehner, and the debt ceiling deal. Which is slightly odd. This is one of those debates which is much more about process than anything else. The only reason to invest it with earth-shaking importance is if you’re either (a) just starved for copy, or (b) it feeds into deeper, pre-existing concerns about Obama and/or Republicans. As a stand-alone issue, the debt ceiling debate will be forgotten in a few weeks.

All of that said, the two best liberal columns I’ve seen are from Glenn Greenwald and William Galston.

Greenwald’s piece is part of his long-running, principled critique of Obama, and it’s pretty good on its own terms. But the two bits that stood out were funny, self-aware links he posted. The first is to this cartoon:

The second is a tweet by liberal Charles Davis: “Remember when Michele Bachmann killed all those innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Libya? Ugh. Hate her.” Such self-examination will almost certainly pass as we get closer to November 2012. If it doesn’t, Obama is in even bigger trouble than he looks, because it would mean that he’s moving from Dukakis into Carter territory.

But Galston’s piece is even more damning. Here he is dropping the hammer:

As many critics have pointed out, this man-made crisis was entirely avoidable. The Democrats could have raised the ceiling last December. They chose not to, handing a sword to their adversaries. Senate majority leader Harry Reid wanted to force the incoming Republicans to accept some responsibility for the increase. We’ve seen how that worked out. And if President Obama genuinely believed that the Republicans would cooperate because it was the right and responsible thing to do, then naïveté was the least of his mistakes. (A moment of introspection about his own 2006 vote against increasing the debt ceiling should have sufficed to disabuse him of that notion.)

Jonah Goldberg has another excellent column. He focuses on Obama’s claim to pragmatism, but mentions in passing something that should be a line in the stump speech for whoever the Republican nominee is.

Goldberg notes the following line from Obama:

Earlier last week, referring to the fact that he is rich, the president said: “I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing. In fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need.”

He then adds, “the man lives in public housing and has a government jet at his disposal.”

But that’s not going far enough. The Republican nominee should quote this line of Obama’s often, and then follow it with some of the extravagant expenses Michelle Obama has racked: the $500,000 trip to Africa, the pleasure trip to Spain with 40 of her friends, the $100,000 “date night” in New York, the extensive and expensive personal staff she requires.

All of these expenses were picked up by taxpayers. The eventual nominee should note all of this and then tell voters that perhaps President Obama would “need” more money if the rest of us didn’t have to pay for his wife’s lifestyle.

Galley Friend X sends in the following observation about Mitt Romney’s ability to make the jobs case against Obama:

Romney is making a big push on jobs.  In his new ad, he takes Obama’s line that economy faces some “bumps in the road,” and he runs with it: a bunch of weary-looking Americans get up off a road and say, “I’m an American, not a bump in the road.”

But this ad has a ready-made response: Where are all the people whose employers were acquired by Romney’s private equity fund, Bain Capital, and who were subsequently laid off by Bain to make the acquired company more profitable?

So Romney’s opponents can go out and show the video from the 2008 speech in which Romney said, “By the way, you know, layoffs happen. … Of course you have layoffs sometimes to try to keep the company alive.”  And they can keep pointing to the Boston Globe’s big 2008 article on how Romney got rich while Bain gutted companies.

I’m not saying that Romney’s wrong to highlight Obama’s dumb “bump in the road” line.  But Romney’s probably the last guy the Republicans want making this argument.  Just like the Obamacare fight: Romney is probably the least-well-positioned Republican in this fight.