"Obama should be better than Cheney. But aides are not helping the president prevail in what ought to be an easy competition."

In The Nation, John Nichols slams the man he calls the "Whiner-in-Chief":

When Dick Cheney kept giving "exclusive" interviews to Fox "personalities," there were those of us who ridiculed both the personalities and the former vice president for going through the ridiculous exercise of lobbing softballs and swinging at them.... Cheney saw newspapers such as The New York Times and news channels such as CNN as little more than branches of his Democratic opposition.

When [White House communications director Anita] Dunn was asked whether the president refused to accept interview requests from Fox because the White House sees the network as "a wing of the Republican party," the communications director responded: "Is this why he did not appear? The answer is yes."

It's wrong of Obama to shun the media he perceives as oppositional, but it's even worse, Nichols says, "to try and 'whip' relatively like-minded writers and reporters into line." (Why did Nichols put "whip" in quotes? So we wouldn't picture Obama with an actual whip or because he really wanted to say "pussy-whip.")

[T]hat appears to be what the Obama team was trying to do with the silly "policing action" of having a White House "adviser," speaking on condition of anonymity, encourage liberal bloggers to "take off their pajamas" and get serious about politics...

The bloggers should also take the criticism as confirmation that they are right when they suggest that this administration is increasingly out of touch with the progressive base that secured Obama the Democratic nomination and ultimately propelled him to the White House.

The fact is that the results of the 2008 election did not reveal "a closely-divided country." Obama arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the most muscular mandate accorded any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide.

("Muscular mandate"... I love that.)

IN THE COMMENTS: t-man said:

How can they say he had a mandate when no one even knew what they were voting for?

I think he's doing exactly what he got a mandate to do: vagueness, dithering, pleasing without really doing anything. Give the man some credit! That's why I voted for him.