If they say "we were right, you were wrong!" loud enough, will that make it so?

More folks on the Right are jumping on that Economist critique of Obama's presidency thus far.

Commentary Magazine blog:

there is an element of managerial incompetence, but the real issue is that the Right was correct about Obama: he’s an ultra-liberal at least on domestic policy, not a pragmatic centrist either on policy or in style. His mode of governance — denigrate the opposition, engage in ad hominem attacks, refuse to compromise on substantive policy, disguise radical policy intentions with a haze of meaningless rhetoric — bespeaks someone supremely confident in his ideological views and undaunted by fears (which are slowly creeping up on his Red state colleagues) of having overshot his mandate.

You gotta laugh at the parallel reality in which Obama is an "ultra-liberal" who's attacked a rational opposition personally and in which Republicans apparently haven't been busy disgracing themselves with their own reality-free denigrations of Obama.

It is therefore unlikely that Obama will change course unless forced by electoral realities or external events. If the next several bond auctions are a bust perhaps then the spend-a-thon will slow. If unemployment rises and his poll numbers fall, perhaps he’ll hold off on burdening employers for just a bit. If he loses 30 or 40 House seats in 2010 he won’t have the legislative latitude to throw up whatever legislation he wants (or to defer to Nancy Pelosi).

But barring these developments it appears we are in for more of the same for the remainder of his term. It’s not what the Economist expected, but it is pretty much what most conservatives did.

Hot Air:

> Mr Obama has seemed curiously feeble.

Why “curiously”? After all, Obama had next to no executive experience before running for the presidency. His only executive experience came at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where Obama spent over $160 million and had no effect on education. He has never been responsible for a public budget, public appointments, or economic policy. And they find his poor performance “curious”? Would The Economist have hired Obama to run their magazine based on his resumé and then found his incompetence “curious”?

[...] If Obama is not who The Economist thought he was, then the fault lies with The Economist and not Obama. The scales may be falling from their eyes now, but if they had done their jobs a few months ago, it wouldn’t be necessary at all.

Oh really? Let me direct you to the Economist's endorsement a week before the election:

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

That seems pretty clear-eyed to me. But apparently Hot Air believes that if the Economist had "done their jobs" months ago, they wouldn't be having any buyer's remorse.

Does Hot Air think the Economist should not have endorsed anyone? Because they were pretty clear on why McCain was less acceptable, and their endorsement was primarily anti-Republican, anti-McCain, and anti-Palin:

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.

That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.

They went on to acknowledge some of Obama's deficiencies:

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well. [here they've been disappointed. --GL]

[...] Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.

This largely looks like it was spot-on to me. And in an earlier post I offered my conjecture that while there certainly are management decisions Obama might have done better, his administration has a ton on problems on its plate and it's unclear how many people alive would be doing a better job in this president's shoes --- but I'm at least confident a McCain or a Palin wouldn't be doing better overall.

Thus in the new opinion piece we're discussing, "Learning the hard way", the Economist is offering a disappointed critique of Obama's learning & management so far. But that hardly means their original assessment wasn't a pretty darn good job, or that they don't have many reasons to stand by their wholehearted endorsement over the McCain-Palin farce.

If the Right wants the public to embrace them as an alternative, they need to stop merely criticizing the president. The Economist, Andrew Sullivan, and various independents such as your humble author are going to be more credible on this front.

Instead the Right needs to offer us something better to choose from. So far I'd say they're failing miserably, but that doesn't quite capture the insane inanity of their spending freeze and alternative budget proposal.