Cozying up to pols, sure, but so does every other news outfit.

I deeply regret to say I doubt very much if any of this is going to touch Fox News and Roger Ailes.  Their sins lie in other directions and are not officially criminal.

The first was Matt Stoller's over at naked capitalism, in which he contrasted the leadership styles of Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama.  After relating an anecdote about Warren responding to Republican hammering about whether she was running a campaign to, in essence, sell, the CFPB by saying, "I always try to convince people that I'm right," Matt says this:

Contrast this with Barack Obama, a person who never fails to wrap his true agenda in gauzy opaque process jargon. Obama won't back his own NLRB or Boeing workers, or even Boeing itself; he thinks that neither side should waste time in court. He won't announce Social Security or Medicare cuts, he wants it to be part of a Grand Bargain for whom no one has to take responsibility. He demands an end to earmarks, or something, but we need an infrastructure bank or something. As a result, the Democratic Party is enmeshed right now in a guessing game about the true goals of their leader, paralyzed and unable to govern. When Warren is present, by contrast, the Republicans are able to argue strongly that they do not believe in government as an agent of good, while Democrats are able to articulate the opposite. It's a real, open, honest debate. There's no sliding around with 11 dimensional chess nonsense, it's straight up democracy.

[snip]

Many people are "disappointed" with Obama. But, while it is certainly true that Obama has broken many many promises, he projected his goals in his book The Audacity of Hope. In Audacity, he discussed how in 2002 he was going to give politics one more shot with a Senate campaign, and if that didn't work, he was going into corporate law and getting wealthy like the rest of his peer group. He wrote about how passionate activists were too simple-minded, that the system basically worked, and that compromise was a virtue in and of itself in a world of uncertainty. His book was a book about a fundamentally conservative political creature obsessed with process, not someone grounded in the problems of ordinary people. He told us what his leadership style is, what his agenda was, and he's executing it now.

David Dayen's was the second post.  In the "Obama's Last Lecture" video that is making the rounds, Obama says this:

the nature of our politics is to marry principle to a political process that means you don't get 100% of what you want. You don't get it if you're in the majority, you don't get it if you're in the minority.

David says::

I don't think anyone would disagree that Obama deeply believes this in his core. The man who came to power on a message of hope is saying that there's no real hope in implementing the full governing agenda in the American system. That's true, apparently, even if you have a large majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate, which Obama had for several months of his first term. That's true, apparently, even if we're talking about issues and policies where the President has full authority on his own, with HAMP being the best example.

[snip]

But there's also a difference between the person who views those procedural blockages for what they are, and sees opportunities for pressuring those blockages through the court of public opinion, for making it difficult on those holding up progress to sustain themselves, for using elections as a lever to enable progress, and even for changing the fundamental structures to bring our democracy up to date to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and... Barack Obama. Because here he doesn't just acknowledge the need for compromise. He glories in it. He sees it as "part of the process of growing up." It's juvenile to act on your own beliefs, to draw bright lines that cannot be crossed, to express core convictions. "Don't set up a situation where you're guaranteed to be disappointed," Obama says. That's the worst thing that could ever happen. He makes an enemy out of disappointment, when it can just as easily be a rallying point, an opportunity to show a better path next time.

In a follow-up post, Dayen responds to a Steve Benen post on the same video, and has this to say:

Yes, when Roosevelt came up with a meager Social Security system, many of the activists working on the issue for years were unhappy. Rather than cover this territory again, I'll just quote myself. "Townsend" mentioned here refers to Francis Townsend, the retired physician who led the movement for old-age pensions, building a grassroots army across the country that claimed 20 million supporters.

[snip]

Similarly, abolitionists were harshly critical when Lincoln compromised on the Emancipation Proclamation. Civil rights leaders were apopletic at early, fatally compromised anti-discrimination legislation. Gay activists went nuts when Obama appeared to squander the opportunity to end Don't Ask Don't Tell. This is part of our politics, too. And the dissenters are almost always a positive force for progress over time. It's fair to say that progress wouldn't come in the form it does without dissent.

And after reproducing a quote in which MLK, Jr. says:

And I had to answer by looking that person into the eye, and say `I'm sorry sir but you don't know me. I'm not a consensus leader.' [Laughter - Applause] I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of my organization or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

Dayen ends with this:

Politics cannot survive on incrementalists alone. It cannot survive with only an inside game, and a political science conception of the art of the possible. Ultimately it needs people on the outside who look at what the incrementalists have produced, and say "No." It doesn't make those people juvenile, it doesn't make them unrealistic. It makes them an integral part of the democratic process.