A critique of Obamacare and Obama by a liberal columnist. Not very favorable.

Here's a devastating, even sarcastic critique of Obamacare and President Obama by Margaret Carlson with Bloomberg and formerly Time magazine.

Two statements explain the huge failure of Obamacare. One is by President Barack Obama, the other is about him. 

The first was made in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the end of the 2008 primary campaign, when candidate Obama predicted that generations would look back and see his nomination as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Couple this with the assessment of his closest aide, Valerie Jarrett, about his exceptionalism. “He knows exactly how smart he is,” she told Obama biographer David Remnick. “And he knows that he has the ability -- the extraordinary, uncanny ability -- to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them.”

Obama “has never really been challenged intellectually,” she went on. “He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”  

Or what an ordinary president does, for that matter. A chief executive less bored than Obama would have stayed on top of his signature legislation. Those upset that he didn’t are bedwetters, the White House says, nervous Nellies who can’t comprehend the larger picture of health-care reform that will, in due time, emerge. White House spokesman Jay Carney intones the mantra that the president “is focused on delivering the access to quality and affordable health insurance” and isn’t concerned “about the politics of that.”

What's interesting is Carlson is not a conservative.  I think she sees that arrogance may destroy a singular goal of the liberal establishment: government run, single payer health care system.  For that she's not happy.

Interesting take on the elections.

Here's an interesting election analysis by Margaret Carlson with Bloomberg. Formerly with Time magazine, she's not a conservative pundit. She points out that an enormous anti-incumbent mood is brewing and Republicans aren't interested in moderate candidates. Which means very conservative candidates will be put up in 2010.

There are many ways to think about Tuesday’s election, some of which are completely wrong. “The real story here is, I think, this thing is ambiguous,” White House adviser David Axelrod said. That’s true only if ambiguous is a synonym for frightening.

There’s one piece of good news for Democrats. They won in New York’s 23rd congressional district for the first time since the mid-19th century, largely because Republicans were in turmoil. NY23 might suffice as a face-saving story offered by Democratic mouthpieces, so long as they don’t actually believe it or foist it on the boss in the Oval Office.

The Democrats’ problems concern direction and mood; the Republicans’ loss in the 23rd showed a weakness of tactics. They weren’t prepared to succeed in driving out the establishment Republican candidate and didn’t have a strong alternative in Doug Hoffman, a charisma-less accountant with the smarts of a fifth grader. Conservatives will surely field a better candidate in 2010. Congressman-elect Bill Owens would be wise to rent, not buy, in Washington.

As hard as it may be for the GOP to contain Sarah Palin (R- Facebook), Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their various allies, it’s a lot harder to deal with a public that’s losing faith in government to improve their lot.

According to exit polls in both Virginia and New Jersey, more than 85 percent of voters said they were worried about the country’s economy. While Obama didn’t create the economic meltdown, it’s his to cure....

She concludes:

With polls showing government in remarkably low esteem and falling, running in 2010 is likely to be easier as an outsider of either party than as an insider. Incumbents should be afraid, very afraid.