How do you know Obama is failing? Just ask people who didn’t vote for him!

How should one measure political success? That was my first reaction to Julia Pettengill’s Standpoint article headlined Is the Obama Presidency Failing? Sensible, I suppose, for Standpoint to present this as a question to be debated, not a verdict that had already been delivered. And it’s bad luck on Ms Pettengill that her piece should have been commissioned after Scott Brown’s triumph in Massachusetts and filed before health care reform was passed. Such are the perils of journalism.

Nevertheless the article is instructive, not least because of how it is organised and the extent to which it reflects certain strands of Washington’s brand of conventional wisdom. Since the author spends much time talking to some of Obama’s conservative critics and very little time with his supporters it’s not wholly surprising that Pettengill suggests that the President is failing and that he’s doing so because he’s not “listening” to the people and because he’s far too “partisan” and “ideological”.