I quoted Drew Westen’s essay about Obama in my previous post. Now comes Jon Chait:

Westen’s complaint against Obama is rooted primarily in a lack of factual understanding of what Obama has done. Westen castigates Obama for promising not to support entitlement cuts without higher revenue and then turning around and supporting a deal doing exactly that:

The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts.

In fact, the budget agreement does not include any entitlement cuts. It consists of cuts to domestic discretionary (i.e., non-entitlement spending.)

Likewise, he implies that Obama supported the undermining of the coverage expansion in his health care reform by cutting Medicaid:

He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day.

This is also totally false. The budget agreement contains no cuts to Medicaid or to state budgets. The automatic cuts that would go in effect should Congress fail to agree on a second round of deficit reduction exempt Medicaid. Both Obama and the GOP have consistently said that Obama has refused to place the Affordable Care Act on the negotiating table. And, finally, states are legally required to maintain Medicaid benefits — which is to say, Westen’s scenario of fictional cuts to state budget resulting in the decimating of Medicaid could not happen even if it were real.

Chait argues that Westen has fallen into the trap set for us by Aaron Sorkin in both The West Wing and The American President: that Presidential rhetoric can somehow overcome all the procedural obstacles his opposition can put in front of him. That’s probably true.

I don’t think Chait’s argument diminishes my argument that Obama has been unwilling or incapable of recognizing the tenor of his opposition and calling it out on it, but I recognize that Westen’s a little naive in believing that speechmaking trumps filibusters and vote counting.