The Obama supporter's conundrum

OBAMA: Congress Is Apparently Too Stupid To Understand My Jobs Bill, So We're Going To Simplify It For Them

President Barack Obama took a shot at Congress on Monday, saying they might have had difficulty wrapping their heads around his 200-page jobs bill.

"We're going to break up my jobs bill. Maybe they [Congress] couldn't understand it all at once," he said in Asheville, North Carolina — the first stop of his three-day bus tour promoting the American Jobs Act.

You have probably seen the Audi ad with Phil Jackson in which Jackson tells an irate restaurant manager that "anger is the enemy of instruction."

It would seem that President Obama has not learned an equivalent lesson, that ridicule is the enemy of bipartisanship. Insulting the Congress about your "jobs" bill is not going to motivate them to get right on it.

But let us imagine a diehard Obama supporter trying to assess this debacle. This supporter believes with all her heart that the only way to revive the economy is to pass all the president's "jobs" bill. Never mind that economists have not been exactly lining up to throw their reputations behind supporting the bill. Never mind that it is nothing but more of the same thing that has failed completely since January 2009. This support's belief, like almost all beliefs of the Left, is unassociated with actual facts. It is ideology alone that sustains this supporter.

But here is her conundrum:

1. Obama is simply unable to bring the factions of the Congress together, including fractious members of his own party, to get the bill passed.

2. Or Obama is unwilling to do what it takes to get the bill passed, of which his inflammatory rhetoric is evidence. Alienating the members who should be your natural allies may be less a sign of ineptitude than unwillingness.

So - shall the Obama supporter continue to support the president when he routinely does not get done what the supporter thinks is most important? And if so, why?

This is exactly the question that is driving Obama's numbers ever lower. En masse, his formerly huge cohort of supporters are dwindling fast. While they can't support Obama any more, they are not running to the Republicans, either. Even so, when Obama loses reelection next year, it will be less because of massive Republican turnout than that former Obama voters stayed home.

Update: Maybe that's why Obama continues to remind people that the Republicans just want you to die.

Update: And VP Biden says that Republicans want you to be raped.