Department Of 'No Shit, Sherlock'

Political Wire

Is the Country Fixed Yet?

Walter Shapiro: "Now that we have created this 86,400-seconds-a-day expectation of instant political news, it is virtually impossible to return to prior laid-back ways of thinking about Washington. The problem, of course, is that successful governing requires far more than merely winning a particular morning's news cycle. But our foreshortened attention span gets in the way of long-term perspective. As a result, it is easy to get caught up in the fiction that the fate of Obama's presidency rides with the short-term direction of the stock market, the cleverness of Robert Gibbs' putdowns of Dick Cheney, or even the pace of appointments to the sub-Cabinet."