Nervous Democrats say President Obama must be bolder on economy

By Karen Tumulty and Peter Wallsten,
WashPost
Published: August 10

With President Obama’s reelection on the line, Democrats are increasingly anxious about what they see as his failure to advance a coherent and muscular strategy for addressing the nation’s economic ills.

Growing numbers of Obama’s allies, beyond the liberal activists who have expressed disappointment in the past, contend that he has trimmed his sails too much since the party’s electoral defeats last fall. This sentiment has sharpened in the wake of the negotiations over the debt ceiling, when the president accepted Republican demands for spending cuts without obtaining guarantees of tax revenue increases, which he said were necessary for a “balanced approach.”

Obama’s standing has been further challenged by a string of recent events that are testing his presidential mettle: the first-ever credit downgrade of the U.S. government by the Standard & Poor’s rating agency on Friday night, a helicopter crash in Afghanistan that same night that killed 22 Navy SEALs and eight other service members, and a topsy-turvy stock market once again prompting fears of a double-dip recession.

“The president has shown himself unwilling to just dig in on a position,” said Dee Dee Myers, who was Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary. “He’s for jobs. I’ve heard him say that. He’s for being the grown-up in the room. But beyond that, I’m not actually sure what his bottom line is.”

(More here.)