The Unnecessary Fall of the Apologizer-in-Chief: A counter-history of the Obama presidency

There is no doubt that, if the economy were growing faster, and if unemployment were dropping below 9 percent, Obama and the Democrats would be more popular and not fearing a November rout.

On the left, The New Republic's John R Judis has written a damning (if sympathetic) indictment of Barack Obama's way of governing, a screed that so appalled and infuriated his fellow leftists that the senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — "a man of the left" — has had to pen a defense of the article.

I have been accused of being “hysterical” and “ahistorical,” of glorifying Ronald Reagan, of “moving away from” my “previously clear-eyed stance on the primary source of Obama's troubles,” and of relying on the same “white-working-class Theory of Everything” I have been “peddling … ever since summer 2008.” And that’s just in public. Privately, the criticism has been far more withering and has included words far too incendiary to print in a family magazine. But I’ve spent a lot of time considering some of the (quite thought-provoking and reasonable) counter-arguments to my piece, and I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to them here.