bq. Part of the issue here is the cult of the presidency. We hold the president responsible for everything that happens. The notion that the president and both houses of Congress must agree on most actions in instinctively dissatisfying. And so we think of every problem as a question of “what should the president do.” Layered on top of that is a failure to recognize the deep-seated disagreement between Obama and the Republicans over what we should do…
bq. …This is one way in which conservative journalism is actually far more sophisticated than mainstream news journalism. Conservative pundits, while usually slanting their account in highly partisan and often misleading terms, do a fairly good job of grasping and explaining the fact that the two parties fundamentally disagree on the causes of and solutions to the economic crisis and the long-term deficit. In this sense, a Rush Limbaugh listener may well be better informed about the causes of the impasse than listener of NPR or other mainstream organs. The former will have in his mind a wildly slanted version of the basic political landscape, while the latter’s head will be filled with magical thinking.
From a post from Jonathan Chait. Read the whole thing to put those two passages in context. Here is an old post of mine very much in sympathy with Chait’s point re: the presidency.