Who's right? The NYT or The Onion?

  Over at the NY Times (the paper of record), and although it seems a bit early for writing eulogies considering the 2012 election is a few months off still, another liberal is trying to figure out what went wrong with the Obama presidency. 
  It's sort of sad as watching liberals scratching around like chickens in the dirt to figure out why their policies of free everything unless you work aren't working.
  First the psychology professor author Mr. Westen lists all the reasons Obama should have been the greatest prez evah. First he establishes how truly truly bad things were when George Bush was president and how conservatives ruined everything: what the reader is to understand is that what is so wrong now--S&P downgrade, huge and pending debts, high jobless rates-- is no worse than when Bush was in office.
  All Obama needed to succeed, Westen explains,was to talk more.
  If only he had talked more, everyone would have understood. Because we're stupid, we needed pictures and repetition:  "no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, “stick.” "  
  Or if only *The Prince* had spent more on the stimulus:  "against the advice of multiple Nobel-Prize-winning economists — he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. " Nobel Prize winners are never wrong and always earn their awards, so more money spent on studying Chinese prostitutes' work habits would provide jobs for Americans. Overpaid academics anyway.
  But if Obama wouldn't compromise so much with these meanie conservatives, then liberal ideas would work.
  In another apparent memory lapse, the writer suggests that the root of Mr. "I won"s problems is that he has a "deep-seated aversion to conflict and [a] profound failure to understand bully dynamics " --apparently anyone who opposes liberals is guilty of bully dynamics. This is certainly not true of Obama's Chicagoland machine, which is known for getting what it wants.
  It's interesting that the same people who hailed this man as a healer, a uniter, are now lamenting that he hasn't been confrontational enough.
  This piece is entitled, "What happened to Obama?" but on the website it is entitled, "What happened to Obama's passion?" 
  These are two completely different topics. 
  The first implies disillusionment on the part of the observer; the second implies inadequacy on Obama's part. 
  The first title is probably more accurate for this writer, as he has an unrealistic view of the country's economy, the debt struggle and the actual cuts that took place during the debt deal. Westen moans that too much money has been "cut" by the debt debate resolution, which in reality cut only a small portion of the increase in growth which is about 8% annually, and that, "now the Republicans are chipping away at unemployment insurance, and the president is making his usual impotent verbal exhortations after bargaining it away."
  The Prince is no longer an eloquent speaker but an impotent verbal exhorter?
  What, then, does Obama stand for? 
  The author doesn't know. In addition, Westen's disillusionment extends to the party itself: "Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue."
  And ha! Then comes this as a suggestion for whatever happened to Barack Obama: 

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

  And:

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. 

  This story in the NY Times is one of the most shopped around articles around today. Talk of dumping Obama has been around for quite a while; where it goes will be precisely nowhere.
  It is reflective of the state of denial in which liberals exist.
  It's not the philosophy that's the problem; it's the flawed individuals who carry out the philosophy.
  If only Dr. Drew Westen would read The Onion, some of his questions would be answered:

"As is human nature, power tends to corrupt even the noblest of men," Browning said. "The more power the collective has over the lives of the individuals, as is the case in this household, the more he who is in charge of distribution has to gain by being unscrupulous. These Marxists will soon realize they overestimated how much control they would like 514 W. Elm as an entity to have."