At the risk of seeing his blogging upstaged, Jon has graciously agreed to accept occasional guest posts from former contributors to the now-defunct Plank. The blogging instinct doesn't die overnight, after all (and nearly any blogger welcomes some added content).
My contribution today is a quick observation about a reader email Ben Smith posted today defending Barack Obama's first term.
But today, the president is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never made such a promise. It's time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can't just wave a magic wand and fix everything.
I have to chuckle at that last line (bolded by me), which is a near-verbatim recitation of Hillary Clinton's case against Obama from the height of the 2008 primaries. (Remember the celestial choir riff?) That doesn't invalidate the point, I suppose (although I think Obama's primary campaign in particular did raise some false expectations). But it's still ironic to see it being co-opted now by Obama's defenders.