Pitney, Pestritto, and Voegeli on Year One in the Age of Obama

First, here's R. J. Pestritto [quoted in part] in National Review:

Democrats said something else during the campaign that we should have listened to. With remarkable consistency, they identified themselves with progressivism and made clear that they aimed to revive the principles and policies of the Progressive Movement from the turn of the 20th century. Many assumed this to be mere rhetoric — “progressive” was simply thought to be a nicer way of saying “liberal,” which had become dirty word in American politics. But the Democrats clearly had more in mind, and have now pursued the main planks of the progressive agenda originally laid out by the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

That agenda was as clear as it was radical: Wilson and Roosevelt loathed the Constitution’s limits on federal authority and sought various ways to undermine them, sometimes through a direct frontal assault but more often through a creative or “living” interpretation of the Constitution’s language (think of how today’s Democratic leaders dismiss the slightest questioning of Obamacare’s constitutionality). They also planned for the national government to take on a much-expanded role in regulating society and private wealth by delegating significant discretionary authority to expert bureaucracies (think of our present TARP program and its progeny — and thank the Bush administration for helping to give the Democrats a running start).

Second, here is Professor John J. Pitney, talking about Andrew Sullivan, the ultimate birther, and how dirty Obama's style politics is.

In a way, President Obama does match up to Candidate Obama. For anyone willing to look carefully, the 2008 campaign showed that he would speak of civility and unity while his crew engaged in hard-edged, polarizing tactics. After Bristol Palin’s pregnancy became public, for instance, he won praise for saying that candidates’ family lives were off-limits and that he would fire anyone in his campaign who spread rumors about the Palin children’s parentage. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, of course, was busy at the time doing just that, which didn’t prompt Obama’s staff to remove the samples of Sullivan’s writing it had re-posted to the official campaign site or prevent the president from quoting him in speeches. A week before his inauguration, Obama met with a group of center-left journalists that included Sullivan.

And family certainly wasn’t off-limits for Howard Gutman, a member of Obama’s national finance committee, who criticized Sarah Palin’s parenting. After the election, Obama made Gutman a trustee of his inauguration committee and then appointed him to be ambassador to Belgium.

Petty political warfare has continued. Earlier this year, the Obama White House directed an effort to demonize Rush Limbaugh. More recently, the staff has been waging a campaign against Fox News. In the beginning, some Republicans may actually have believed the president’s rhetoric about setting aside “the smallness of our politics.” Now they know that he didn’t really mean it.

Here is William Voegeli, talking about the luck that Obama's had and how it will run out.

It’s as hard to get a fix on the president’s political beliefs as it is to get a fix on his political skills. The Zelig-like Barack Obama fit into Jeremiah Wright’s congregation when establishing himself in a black district. Once his political ascent there was blocked, he acclimated to the Hyde Park ethos that regarded Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn as having picaresque but morally unproblematic pasts. He fit in with ethically flexible Chicago pols like Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich when he needed to build a political network for a statewide campaign. And, despite signals in 2008 that his time at the University of Chicago had left him conversant with and tolerant of arguments about what government couldn’t and shouldn’t do, he now fits in in Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman’s Washington. He has spent the last twelve months as their enabler, which is looking more and more like a role that will hasten the day that his luck runs out.