Well, to be fair, Ruth Marcus didn’t explicitly specify bloggers on the Left, but that was certainly the context in this MSNBC clip captured by Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher. The Washington Post columnist can’t understand why the Left doesn’t appreciate that Barack Obama can’t get their agenda through a Congress where Democrats only have majorities of, er … 77 seats in the House and eighteen seats in the Senate. Instead of reaching the obvious conclusion, which is that the Left’s agenda is too radical for mainstream America to adopt (a lesson that Democrats will learn in November), Marcus prefers to call bloggers “deranged” for pushing what Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid repeatedly promised them:

Tommy also thinks that bloggers have a point in criticizing Obama’s strategy:

While it is true that a great many liberals have too-high expectations of President Obama, and little patience, the example that Marcus cites is the worst one possible. On health care, the left has an indisputably valid point. In her column, Marcus wrote “Can these people count to 60?”

As a matter of fact, we can, but apparently, the Democrats can’t. Instead of pressing the advantage while they had that filibuster-proof Senate majority, President Obama went on a pointless consensus-building exercise that resulted in a weaker law that barely passed after Scott Brown upended that 60-seat majority.

It’s a bit of a cliche´, but the truth lies somewhere in the middle. There are many on the left for whom pragmatism is a dirty word, and Gibbs was right to throw cold water on comparisons to Bush. But it’s not a hippie acid trip to think that the Dems could have gotten a stronger health care bill had they, themselves, bothered to count to 60 while they still could.

I doubt Marcus would describe the Right’s bloggers with any less-inflammatory adjective, but really, the story here is the failure of Obama’s agenda to win support from the mainstream. Being outside the mainstream of political thought doesn’t make one “deranged,” though, and arguing honestly for the policies one prefers is not the worst thing that can happen in a free society. Marcus claims this is a slow news month, which is true enough, but perhaps she and the White House would both be better off focusing on the failures of Obama’s polices and strategies rather than demonizing the people pointing out the failures.