Old Gray Lady Grabs Obama by the Ear

The Obama administration bore an avalanche of criticism this weekend from the usually friendly New York Times. Influential columnists Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman, and Maureen Dowd—plus the paper’s editorial board—all piled on a president who “is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage,” Politico reports.

Rich and Friedman excoriate Barack Obama for his week-kneed reaction to the AIG-bonus furor, while an editorial slams the administration’s security policies as “a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s.” Citing Michelle's no-nonsense attitude, Dowd muses on whether “the wrong Obama is in the Oval,” while Nobel laureate Krugman predicted in a blog post that Obama’s coming bank plan will “almost surely” fail. Unlike his predecessor, Politico notes, this president is likely to take such charges seriously.
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