POLITICO

By MJ LEE

The lastest edition of Newsweek features the face of a pensive President Barack Obama along with the provocative headline: “Why are Obama’s critics so dumb?” — and that’s hit a little too close to home for conservative bloggers.

Joel Pollak, editor in chief of Breitbart.com, turned the cover’s question around on Andrew Sullivan, who penned the magazine’s cover story, in a blog post called, “Why is Andrew Sullivan so dumb?”

“You’d have to be stupid, fanatical and dishonest to argue — as Trig Truther Sullivan does — that Barack Obama’s failures are part of an ingenious ‘long game’ that is destined to succeed,” Pollak wrote. “If this is the best Obama’s supporters can do, Obama’s only hope for reelection is the weak Republican field.”

Similarly, Power Line’s John Hinderaker vented in a blog post titled, “We must be really, really stupid!”

“Well, sure. We who are unhappy that unemployment has increased on Obama’s watch, that over-regulation has stymied economic growth, that our children now owe a $15 trillion debt that we can’t pay — hey, we’re just dumb!” he blasted. “We obviously aren’t smart enough to understand how devastating our economy, unemploying millions of Americans and burdening our children with trillions of dollars in debt is really a great idea.”

Sullivan, a self-described “unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on,” writes in the cover story that attacks against the president are not only out of bounds but “simply — empirically — wrong.”

“Given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb,” Sullivan wrote. “Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game — and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.”

The story was rated by Townhall’s Managing Editor Kevin Glass as “a doozy about how conservatives are delusional and the left-wing base is just dumber than the president,” and he added that the Newsweek writer has bought into what he called “The Obama Delusion.”

“The president’s critics, on both sides, have and will continue to make sound critiques. And Andrew Sullivan and The Daily Beast are just trolling us,” Glass wrote.

“Is there anything the mainstream media won’t do to get Obama reelected?” Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters wanted to know.

The Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway ripped Newsweek for falling deeper into “self-parody”: “If in recent years it seems as if Newsweek has been descending into self-parody, it’s still hard to imagine that this is real.”

And over at Red State, the magazine’s cover inspired blogger Caleb Howe to exercise some creative liberties by declaring a “Photoshop contest” to make a fake Newsweek cover.

“I’m assuming the thought process, such as it is, was ‘controversial sells magazines,’” he wrote. “So in that light, I have a suggestion for Newsweek’s next cover, one that will really stir things up.”

One of Howe’s several mock Newsweek covers features a sad-faced puppy and the words: “Puppies: Why our editors torture them.”

Sullivan defended the president’s record Monday evening, saying, “Obama has governed as he said he would, as a sensible, pragmatic centrist.” He explained that a frustration about lies people were telling about the president’s record had inspired him to write the cover story.

“I just got frustrated hearing all these people tell untruths about the record,” Sullivan said on MSNBC. “The record is that he has done something perfectly sensible — he’s fulfilled the promises that he made to turn this country round slowly.”

He urged Obama’s critics to have more “patience” when scrutinizing the president’s accomplishments, and suggested that critics approach their negotiations with the president without a “fantasy about who this guy is.”

“He’s not a big old lefty,” he added. “I mean, ask the left. He’s a compromiser in the middle and I think what he’s done is set out very carefully where he wants to go.”

Mark Miller, assistant managing editor of Newsweek, insisted earlier on Monday that Sullivan’s piece articulates criticism of the president from “both the left and the right.”

“I think Andrew makes the case fairly well that the way that he’s been caricatured by the right and the way that the left is disappointed with him doesn’t actually serve him well,” Miller said on MSNBC.

He noted that one of Obama’s biggest problems is that he “isn’t out there … grandstanding and talking about his accomplishments in a way that may be necessary to break through the noise.”