“He piddled around when he had 60 votes.”

Obama, that is.

Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in the NYT features Dowd’s sister, Peggy, a Republican who voted enthusiastically for Obama in 2008 (she had soured on Bush and detested Cheney and Rumsfeld). But Peggy is now disenchanted:

Obama has to get “a backbone” if he wants to lure her back to the fold. “He promised us everything, saying he would turn the country around, and he did nothing the first year,” Peggy says. “He piddled around when he had 60 votes. He could have pushed through the health care bill but spent months haggling on it because he wanted to bring some Republicans on board. He was trying too hard to compromise when he didn’t need the Republicans and they were never going to like him. Any idiot could see that.