A teachable moment

Astonished, anguished and agonized, “the left is hatin' on Obama, all but calling him a Judas for cutting a tax deal with the GOP,” wrote Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach, perfectly encapsulating the media narrative about how liberal Democrats were reacting to last week’s compromise. And once again, the narrative was dead wrong. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll reported seven in 10 Americans back the tax deal negotiated by the president. And a whopping 69 percent of liberal Democrats (i.e., "the left") support the agreement, too. The folks enraged by the deal were the usual suspects: party activists and liberal pundits, the so-called “professional left.” Keep this “teachable moment” in mind whenever the media begins passing judgment on the Democratic (or Republican) base or what America thinks. More often than not, it has no idea what it is talking about.