I think Matt Bai makes some good points about the difference between saying that Barack Obama’s political opinions aren’t substantively left-of-center and saying that Obama doesn’t adopt a populist rhetorical style. But the piece goes a bit off the rails when it starts talking about the possibility of a from-the-left primary challenge to Obama.

Thanks to a much-changed media landscape over the past ten years, you now see a reasonable amount of somewhat high-profile from-the-left criticism of Obama. You’ve got Paul Krugman on the op-ed page, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC prime time, you’ve got the activist blogosphere, and you’ve got reporters like Bai paying some attention to these critics. And I think that’s all a good thing. But one should always keep in mind that the whole “Obama isn’t liberal enough” concept is very much a niche idea. In mid-December, CNN polled on this question:

“Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president?” If disapprove: “Do you disapprove because you think his policies and actions since he became president have been too liberal, or because you think his policies and actions have not been liberal enough?“

Among self-identified Democrats, about eighty percent say they approve of the job Obama is doing. There’s just no way a primary challenge could get off the ground.

If you sent your kid to the bookstore to get some SAT prep materials, and he came back with a Kaplan book that said there was no need to study math because the SAT doesn’t cover math anymore, two things might happen. One, you might immediately recognize that Kaplan was selling a product that contains serious errors. Alternatively—and worse—you and your son might decide that Kaplan was a trustworthy source of information about the SAT and prepare for it wrong. Either result would, of course, be devastating to Kaplan’s reputation and thus to a revenue model that depends on students and their parents having confidence that its materials contain accurate information about standardized tests.

The National Review, meanwhile, is in the business of representing the ideas of the conservative movement. If what the conservative movement wants to do is lie to people about Barack Obama, then The National Review will lie to people about Barack Obama. That’s understandable enough. I’m not one of those so naive as to pretend to be shocked, shocked to discover that there’s lying happening in politics.

But what about the Washington Post? If Charles Krauthammer wants to write a column in which he lies about Barack Obama, why would the Post print it? I mean, here’s Krauthammer on January 1:

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term “war on terror.” It’s over — that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term “asymmetric warfare.”

And here’s Obama giving an address in May about his policies on al-Qaeda: “we are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates.”

Or as John Brennan spelled out in some detail in August:

This leads directly to the second element of the President’s approach—a clear, more precise definition of this challenge. This is critically important. How you define a problem shapes how you address it. As many have noted, the President does not describe this as a “war on terrorism.” That is because “terrorism” is but a tactic—a means to an end, which in al Qaeda’s case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate. Confusing ends and means is dangerous, because by focusing on the tactic, we risk floundering among the terrorist trees while missing the growth of the extremist forest. And ultimately, confusing ends and means is self-defeating, because you can never fully defeat a tactic like terrorism any more than you can defeat the tactic of war itself.

[...]

Instead, as the President has made clear, we are at war with al Qaeda, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al Qaeda’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy. These are the extremists we will defeat.

It makes you wonder what the Post’s owners and editors think the purpose of the product they’re putting out is. Is it supposed to convey accurate information to readers? If that’s what it’s supposed to be doing, they’re not doing a very good job of it. But what’s more, they don’t even seem to be trying.

Neil Irwin’s piece on the lost decade of jobs and GDP growth is well worth reading. I thought, however, that I might pinch this table to make another point.

The modern version of the conservative movement has been with us for decades, and it’s been an influential force in American politics going all the way back to Joe McCarthy calling Dean Acheson a Communist as John Foster Dulles advocated “rollback” of the Soviet Union. But it’s really only in the forms of Ronald Reagan and George W Bush that we’ve seen efforts to put its economic policies into action. Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and George HW Bush were budget-balancers and Richard Nixon doesn’t appear to have cared about economic policy at all. And the Reagan and Dubya presidencies are, whether coincidentally or not, associated with the worst economic performance we’ve had. What’s more, in general economic performance has clearly been worse since the country took its right turn around 1970.

This is similar to, though obviously somewhat different than, Larry Bartels’ observation that the rich do well under Republican presidents but everyone else fairs better under the Democrats.

I think this is all the more striking when you consider that if you judge people based on what they say they’re doing, it’s conservatives who tend to emphasize growth uber alles whereas liberals are seen as balancing growth against other considerations about fairness, equality, ecological sustainability, etc.