David Frum, in his New York Magazine piece, emphasizes that he’s no Barack Obama fan or an admirer of the Obama stimulus package but he is willing to objectively accept the economic mess the new president faced in January 2009 when he took office.
Frum expresses dismay in his stellar essay over traditional conservatives’ willingness to simplistically label the president as the “wrecker-in-chief.”
Here’s how he describes his dismay over the current political discourse:
“Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know — canny investors, erudite authors — sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him — and yet that is done too.”
Read ahead for Frum Part III
