I enjoy reading Frank Rich's column every week. It's usually a deeply researched, beautifully constructed, passionate read. But I wish it varied a little more. Longing for Barack Obama to be some kind of Huey Long, opening can after can of whup-ass on Rush Limbaugh's jiggly behind seems, well, quixotic to me. And if I thought there was some way to win a culture and rhetorical war against the FNC/RNC vortex, I could see the point of this very elegant sentence:

No one expects Obama to imitate Christie’s in-your-face, bull-in-the-china-shop shtick. But they have waited in vain for him to stand firm on what matters to him and to the country rather than forever attempting to turn non-argumentative reasonableness into its own virtuous reward.

This strikes me as grotesquely unfair. I sure know what matters to the president, and a brief survey of his first two years would reveal it rather baldly.

"Non-argumentative reasonableness" so far has prevented a second great depression, rescued Detroit, bailed out the banks, pitlessly isolated Tehran's regime, exposed Netanyahu, decimated al Qaeda's mid-level leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan, withdrawn troops from Iraq on schedule, gotten two Justices on the Supreme Court, cut a point or two off the unemployment rate with the stimulus, seen real wages for those employed grow, presided over a stock market boom and record corporate profits, and maneuvered a GOP still intoxicated with failed ideology to become more and more wedded to white, old evangelicals led by Sarah Palin. And did I mention universal health insurance - the holy grail for Democrats for decades?