Obama had the progressives and independents when he was liberal in his campaign...

O.K., genius mainstream media, explain this to me.

You say that President Obama is caught in a choice, as his approval rating drops. He needs to keep his progressive base, which has been unhappy lately, and he needs to keep his independent voters, who supported him in the election but are losing faith in him now. You say that Obama has to choose to go left to the progressives or go center and right to the independents.

Well, isn't that interesting, because when Obama was at his liberal most, in his campaign and for his election, he attained both progressives and independents as voters. He attained victory then.

Now that Obama has become a president leaning to the center, he is losing his progressives and the independents. Doesn't that suggest that going to the center has been a mistake regarding both groups? If he had their support before, in more liberal days (when he was anti-war, pro-public option for health care, and tough on Wall Street), but not now, in more milquetoast days (when he adds troops to the Afghanistan War, sacrifices the public option, and accepts weak financial reform), which days should he try to reconstruct and revive in order to keep his support and win re-election?

Of course, I believe Obama's sliding downfall, in the polls and in the hearts and minds, is because, when he became president, he surrounded himself with dreary, corporate, centrist Clinton administration people. He must not have had a network of Obama thinkers, though that seems unlikely to me. Instead, he selected Clinton people who are centrist do-nothings, like Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers. He added Hillary Clinton and turns to Bill Clinton, the great sell-out (NAFTA, GATT, Don't-Ask Don't Tell policy, and deregulation of corporations), for advice. He even selected a Clinton adviser, Elena Kagan, as U.S. Supreme Court nominee and her view remains a mystery. Then there's the Clinton guy Rahm Emmanuel who has become the Dick Cheney from the Bush administration for this administration, as the power and mouth behind the throne. It has all amounted to an Obama that couldn't find his own voice and didn't have his own people--despite David Axelrod--to keep him on the progressive track. He defined himself into Bill Clinton when we really needed, expected, and hoped for a Franklin D. Roosevelt. He has listened to his Clinton advisers and they have chipped away at his brand, taking him down, not as quickly as the Titanic but like in a slow, moderate drip. If the Democrats stay the course of another Clinton administration, they will be politically doomed.

In the meantime, no one should say that Obama and his liberal policies didn't work, because he never used liberal policies. He's had centrist, moderate, weakened, watered-down, compromised policies. And if he doesn't get off that road, there's no way he will retrieve the progressives and the independents that he successfully attained during his campaign. He doesn't see it, his Clinton advisers certainly aren't going to tell him, and the genius mainstream media apparently isn't going to offer much more than wrongheaded chatter.