It’s not often that left-leaning columnist Dana Milbank agrees with Charles Krauthammer.
Yet that’s what happened when Milbank ripped President Obama in his Tuesday Washington Post column for being “a bystander.”
Milbank wrote that the “real problem with Obama is not overreach but his tendency to be hands-off.”
Milbank: Conservatives have, in recent weeks, done a 180 in their attack on the president. They have, for the most part, dropped their accusations that he is an out-of-control, overreaching autocrat. Instead, they are calling him a weak and passive leader, nothing more than a bystander.
My colleague Charles Krauthammer captured the revised consensus when he wrote on Friday that with “a sense of disorder growing — the summer border crisis, Ferguson, the rise of the Islamic State, Ebola — the nation expects from the White House not miracles but competence. At a minimum, mere presence. An observer presidency with its bewildered-bystander pose only adds to the unease.”
I don’t get to say this very often, so let me seize the opportunity: I agree entirely with Krauthammer. And I welcome conservatives to their new and more accurate critique of Obama. The real problem with Obama is not overreach but his tendency to be hands-off.
Milbank also noted that despite the rhetoric that Republicans used as recently as three months ago about a possible lawsuit against the president for overstepping his constitutional authority, there has been no lawsuit and there probably won’t be at any point in the future.