Crashing the pajama party

I am pretty sure Andrew Malcolm nails it here.

Saturday night before he was asked about “don’t ask-don’t tell” Obama told the banqueting but impatient Human Rights Campaign crowd (full text right here) all the Democratically-correct things it wanted to hear before the big march for LGBT equality the next day.

So it was very surprising — even jarring — when on Sunday CNBC’s John Harwood, long a respected political journalist, reported a conversation with an anonymous White….

… House “adviser” about the growing grumbling coming not from the predictable party of No but from, oh my, Obama’s own political left, described as the “Internet left fringe.”

Here, just hours after Obama’s warm remarks to his applauding gay constituency, is how Harwood described the conversation on-air:

For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me today those bloggers need to take off their pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely-divided country is complicated and difficult.

As it turns out, the “adviser” was talking about the entire internet-left, but gay bloggers went off.

AmericaBlog’s thoughtful John Aravosis wrote:

So the gay community, and its concerns about President Obama’s inaction, and backtracking, on DADT and DOMA, are now, according to President Obama’s White House, part of a larger “fringe” that acts like small children who play in their pajamas and need to grow up. (And a note to our readers: The White House just included all of you in that loony “left fringe.”)

I wonder how the Human Rights Campaign is going to explain how the White House just knifed our community less than 24 hours after he went to their dinner and claimed he was our friend.

Malcolm sees a method to the madness of giving first and then taking away:

Also, Obama enjoys overwhelming support generally among the nation’s Democrats. So what if his popularity there plummets to 80%?

Now, who’s the president gonna need to support healthcare reform and bandage this Afghan mess heading into the 2010 midterm election year when history says he’ll likely lose seats on the Hill? Bingo, those same conservative/centrist House pals of Emanuel’s whose incumbencies are a main shield against any Republican resurgence.

Oh, and about those crucial independents who elected Obama last November and then started falling away all summer as Obama’s liberal spending, reforms and deficits metastisized? What better way to let those swayable folks come back home than by asking the helpful question, how can Obama possibly be an ultra-liberal if he’s being so publicly vilified by angry ultra-liberals?

So it was no accident whatsoever when that wily White House “adviser” explained, “governing a closely-divided country is complicated and difficult.”

Or, as that wily, briar-patch denizen Br’er Rabbit pleaded of his ursine captor in the old Uncle Remus tales, “Please, please don’t throw me in that briar-patch over there!”

What he said. Conservatives can’t crash this party alone. If moderates and conservative Dems view Obama as a moderate, then we’ll have the pajama party for the duration.