Daily Beast's Tomasky: Obama's Done? No, This Year Was Just a 'Really, Really Bad First Inning'

Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast is still carrying a blazing torch for the president, defending him against all pessimists, in “The Obama Political Obituaries Are Way Premature.” He claims Obama just has “a really, really bad first inning.” Are we ignoring the first term now?

Tomasky insisted everyone should ignore the current conventional wisdom, “that a presidency that is already all but finished, unless John Podesta can somehow save it. The Washington Post reported this week that among second-term presidents in the polling era, only Richard Nixon had a lower approval rating at this point than Obama does now.” Turn that frown upside down, liberal friends, urges Tomasky:

I can read numbers, and I know what’s happened over the past year. Obama has lost support among core Democratic groups such as women and Latinos, and one suspects that the failure — not his failure; the failure, a distinction not enough people are evidently making — to pass immigration reform was disillusioning for these cohorts. And obviously the HealthCare.gov fiasco is the governing reality here. (Italics his.)

Tomasky is obviously ignoring poll numbers, since Bush’s year-end ratings in 2005 (post-Katrina) were better than Obama’s right now. He even claimed “Far be it from me to question The Washington Post’s poll numbers, but Bush was in far worse shape at this point.” With his happy blinders on, Tomasky plugged away:

If the Democrats were running the House right now, there’s little question the immigration bill would have passed. I don’t expect the general public to make such distinctions, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make them. Being smacked down by the opposite party, which has shown its contempt for you a hundred times already, isn’t remotely the same thing as being smacked down by your own party. The Bush [Social Security] privatization failure was devastating not only to his standing as president but as head of his own party.

Obama hasn’t suffered anything like that. He’s been the victim of a couple of ginned-up “scandals,” the IRS most especially, that had no truth to them but nevertheless took a bite out of his ratings. The Republicans are a constant irritant, willing to sacrifice their own standing as long as they can drag him down with them. But he has not launched a huge, historic initiative on which history has slammed the sarcophagus lid screaming “Failure!”

Health care? Come on. You’re joking. That was a bad first inning. Granted, a really, really bad first inning, but a first inning all the same. There is a lot of ball yet to be played. Even now, we’re only in the top of the second in terms of implementation of this law. And every week brings new reports that the troubles are of the past. [Emphasis mine.]

Keep shoveling the pony manure looking for the pony, Michael Tomasky.