Sanitising the Obama story

Conor Friedersdorf asks why liberals continue to do it, in response to Jonathan Chait's recent article on the subject:

Telling the story of Obama's first term without including any of it is a shocking failure of liberalism. It's akin to conservatism's unforgivable myopia and apologia during the Bush Administration. Are liberals really more discontented with Obama's failure to reverse the Bush tax cuts than the citizen death warrants he is signing? Is his ham-handed handling of the debt-ceiling really more worthy of mention than the illegal war he waged? Is his willingness to sign deficit reduction that cuts entitlement spending more objectionable than the fact that he outsourced drone strikes to a CIA that often didn't even know the names of the people it was killing? These are the priorities of a perverted liberalism.

Friedersdorf's rebuttal is the best I've seen to the notion that Obama's presidency has been a successful one, but not to the Chait's article in New York. He seems to miss the point entirely. "Liberals are dissatisfied," Chait wrote, "because they are incapable of feeling satisfied."

(Image: Dec. 21, 2010, source)