One thing about doing this in the Obama era is you tend to get a lot of weird comments from "both sides," you know, the firebaggers and Obots. I'm just joking with those terms, I don't embrace them, and I don't spend a lot of time fighting with either side. Different people have different priorities, different perceptions of constraints on actions, and different perceptions about strategy and goals. Some of this is subjective, and knowing some of it requires mindreading.
Where I, personally, stand on the firebagger-Obot spectrum I don't really know, but I've never been particularly annoyed with people who, roughly speaking, like Obama more than I do or dislike him more than I do. I don't think they're naive, or idiots, or acting in bad faith generally. I just think they see things a bit differently than I do. They might be proved more fucking right than me on some things, and on others they just have different priorities. All that's fine with me.
But I get a lot of accusations of acting in bad faith and of having views I don't have an have never expressed. For lefties, yes, I admit it, I think President Obama was a better choice than President Romney. I think there are scenarios one can map out that suggest the opposite which aren't crazy. I think those scenarios are/were wrong, but not entirely crazy. For Obama partisans, the fact that the president has been talking about chained CPI forever, and I voted for him, doesn't mean that I can't be annoyed that he put it in an aspirational budget document.
I've been writing about Fear of A Grand Bargain forever. It's not like I just woke up to this stuff this morning.
