August 15, 2011
"The deficit/default imbroglio that ended in the deficit-reduction agreement on August 2 has pretty much squelched that hope" that as President Obama would "press a progressive agenda," Margaret O'Brien Steinfels writes over on the Commonweal blog (See The Obama Gamble).
She cites James Kloppenberg, who wrote in Reading Obama, Obama’s commitment to “compromise and painstaking consensus building…represent a calculated risk as political strategy,” and admits “it is a gamble he may lose.”
Steinfels then throws down the gauntlet: "The president has fourteen months to demonstrate that he has not lost the gamble, or to come up with a better, less-accommodating strategy."
