"All you can do is smile at the absurdity of these things piling up"

“All you can do is smile at the absurdity of these things piling up,” said someone who spends much of the day with Obama. Interviews with top White House advisers revealed little smiling in the past 10 days — but a sense that, in the aftermath of it all, they avoided two potential P.R. disasters and emerged with a clear sense of the argument Obama wants to take to voters over the next four months…

The part of the June 15 speech the White House cared about most was little noticed by pundits and reporters: a seemingly dry recitation of Obama’s efforts — including the precise number of ships and linear footage of boom deployed — so that the public would know that the president was on the job.

Instead, the president was hammered by the left for saying too little about caps on carbon and passing a broad global warming bill. Obama was ridiculed on the right for trying to turn an accident into a crisis in need of a Big Government fix. “I know the theater critics didn’t like it, but I have no regrets about it,” Axelrod said. “He didn’t spend a whole lot of time reading the reviews, but he was aware of them.”

“He has neither the inclination nor the time, frankly, to be looking backwards on things like that,” Axelrod continued. “There’s not a lot of time to brood over the peanut gallery.