What Does Barack Obama Really Believe?

Impossible to know, of course.  But this NYT op-ed by Drew Westen has caused a bit of a stir in the liberal blogosphere.  Westen criticizes Obama for failing to lay out a narrative that the People would be able to follow, the way FDR did when faced with a similar crisis:

...when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.

Westen says a lot of what I've said in my last few posts, and though it's a long piece I recommend it to those of you who are interested.

One of the points he makes is that BHO should have come out swinging right from the start, explaining why the recession was so bad, and putting the blame squarely where it belonged- on right-wing policies and politicians.  And such a style would certainly have appealed to me.
My criticism is a little different, though. I don't think BHO could have come out with guns blazing in 2009 after running for president as a conciliatory guy. So I don't fault him too much for the attempts early on to compromise, when he ran on that. But once it became clear that the Republicans were just not going to compromise on anything, and would be totally obstructionist, Obama was incredibly slow figuring this out. In fact I think he still hasn't figured it out. That he's trying to find a budget compromise that Republicans will accept, after they refused a deal where they got practically everything they wanted on the debt ceiling, is just pathetic. I hope to see him start proposing what he thinks is needed and then fighting for it. But I don't think he will, and like Westen I'm not sure what it is that he really does want- it's very possible that BHO is quite happy with all these budget cuts and practically no taxes. And that possibility is what has liberals really upset.