Dowd thinks Obama promised to change Washington's schedule

I hesitate to even talk about Maureen Dowd. It has been clear to me that she's an idiot reporter dabbling in something she thinks is the art of psychobabble since she delved into the Bush family oedipal complex.

But in her column today, she once again goes after President Obama with a vengeance. This time she's referencing his promises to transform a broken Washington. Only she seems to think that what's broken - and what Obama promised to transform - was their schedule. Huh?

Why did this man whose contempt for Congress is clear, who ran on the idea that he could transform a broken Washington, surrender to its conventional timetable and bureaucratic language?...

He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself...

He shouldn’t be driven by the Washington schedule. He should be setting it.

At long last, he promised a clear economic plan. Unfortunately, he had the fierce urgency of next month, when Congress gets back to town.

Americans are rattled and want action. They don’t know or care what Congress’s schedule is. They just see the president not doing anything.

Cruising white Midwestern hamlets in his black bus, Obama tried to justify not calling lawmakers back to D.C. by saying they’d just continue to bicker. But what does he think they’ll do in September?

Seriously? That's what Dowd thought Obama meant when he talked about transforming Washington? That vacations/recesses would be over and they'd simply spend more time demeaning our democratic system in gridlock?

As we've seen, President Obama had some pretty good ideas about how the American voter could use this recess...and folks have followed through. But based on her past analysis, I suppose Dowd would have preferred a dick-swinging president (she does have that oedipal thing going on, doesn't she?) to an engaged citizenry.

On what President Obama actually meant about transforming Washington, I'd suggest that Dowd check in with her colleage Michael Tomasky. At least he gets the ultimate goal right.

Obama believes in civic virtue, and in the idea that in a democracy it’s the duty of responsible leaders to reason together on behalf of something they all agree to call the common good. The fancy name for this theory of government in political-philosophy circles is civic republicanism: the “civic” part refers to action taken in the public sphere, while “republican” (a small-r republican and a big-R Republican are very different animals) signals a concern with tyrannical majorities and a faith that reasoned debate will produce a balanced result...

A return to that kind of civic culture is what Obama hoped to bring about—all that talk about transforming politics. And that vision was key to his appeal during, and before, the campaign. The most famous sentence in Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention speech—“there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America”—is a textbook civic-republican sentiment. After the thuggish, with-us-or-against-us posture of the Bush administration, it was something millions of Americans wanted to hear, and believe in.

As I've said many times before - that's a long game strategy. It's not likely to be completed on Ms. Dowd timetable.