In a meeting with reporters this morning, James Carville, the former adviser to Bill Clinton, made an off-color joke about President Obama’s masculinity. “”If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he’d have two,” Carville joked.
This criticism, about Obama’s alleged lack of toughness, is a rising theme on the left, as I write about in this week’s newsstand edition in a short piece on Adam Green and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. My story begins:
For 34-year-old Adam Green, the midterm elections were not a repudiation of liberalism but a rejection of Barack Obama’s accommodating style. “The only way to get the Republicans to the table,” he says, “is to punch them in the face real hard on one issue.”
Read the whole piece online here, and/or subscribe to the paper product (first 6 weeks for $1.99 intro rate) here.
The specific type of fighting that Green, who helps run the PCCC, wants to see is a straight up-or-down vote on simply extending the middle class tax cuts and letting the tax cuts for the richest 2 percent expire. House Democratic leaders suggested today that they will hold that vote today, though it is not clear if it will have any legislative meaning, considering the support among key moderate Democrats in the Senate for a extending all the tax cuts.