It is instructive that as Politico implicitly blasts the GOP for pausing during these desperate debt-crisis hours merely to grovel to its Hay Market rioting crowd ...
[A]t this late hour, the House [balanced-budget] bill represents a major political escalation ... [a]nd going into 2012, congressional Republicans seem focused on driving their conservative base ...
... E.J. Dionne pauses to incite President Obama to fight, fight, fight for a public works program and multistate bailout to rescue at-risk "teachers, police, firefighters, librarians and other public servants" ...
Excuse me, Mr. President, but if you believe in this policy, why not propose it and fight for it?
Although he rejects it, Dionne courteously provides Obama's answer, from a July 11 press conference: "I’m operating within some political constraints here, because whatever I do has to go through the House of Representatives."
Though only a guess, mine is that if Obama weren't otherwise occupied with delivering the nation from the acute idiocy of nihilistic congressional Republicans, he might indeed make some noise -- however useless -- about saving librarians. But, being the executive fussbudget that he is, Obama first wants to pull us from the abysmal precipice.
My apologies upfront: this brings to mind a historical analogy.
During the late 1930s, as Franklin Roosevelt witnessed the escalating and obviously inescapable and quite possibly existential threat of global fascism, his mind turned to military assistance abroad and a buildup at home. How to accomplish it was the question. Eleanor argued privately to her husband that the vast numbers of small American manufacturers who had suffered for a decade were the first, natural enlistments in such a war-materiel program. They could retool and flourish from defense contracts; this would enact a kind of democratization of government attention and a reflowering of small industry. The president, though, was brutally fixated on the urgent objective of survival; just get the buildup done, which could be done more efficiently through major industry, not only because of its preexisting scope and scale, but because of the internal politics of least resistance.
Presidents are forever pulled by exalted forces agitating on behalf of longer-term actions of supreme righteousness, just as the immediate crisis -- and there always is one -- demands shorter-term actions of supreme pragmatism. On occasion this means nothing short of national survival; this in turn complicates considerably the debate over righteousness vs. pragmatism.
Perhaps I've stacked the deck a bit, but I'll leave it to you to determine which, in reality, is superior.