Because the one described in this week's mag doesn't sound familiar to me.

Here's the subhead to the Anna Quindlen cover story [emphasis added]:

Assessing a young presidency. Barack Obama campaigned as a populist firebrand but governs like a cerebral consensus builder. The founding fathers wouldn't have it any other way.

In Quindlen's defense, she never claims in her piece that Obama “campaigned as a populist firebrand.” In fact, the phrase “populist” never appears in the article. Newsweek editors appear to have simply made that up, since the notion that the centrist Obama campaigned as a “populist firebrand” last year is rather absurd. (In the last century, has a “populist firebrand” ever been elected President of the United States?)

Instead, Newsweek editors did their best to rewrite history in an effort to tag Obama as a flip-flopper; as a candidate who campaigned one way and governed another

Quindlen, however, is responsible for this passage, regarding Obama's slow-moving approach to repealing the military's “don't ask, don't tell” policy toward gays:

This is one where the president does not have to convince the posturing right wing of Congress, the one that invented the spurious notion of death panels in the health-care debate. Transformation is within his grasp, in a pen, a signature, an executive order.

The larger theme of Quindlen's piece is that Obama has not been assertively progressive enough while in office, and that's certainly a fair point to make. But in a classic case of playing down the GOP Noise Machine, does Quindlen really think that if Obama tomorrow repealed “don't ask, don't tell,” the “right wing of Congress,” and the right wing of the U.S. media would simply accept the action and move on? That repealing “don't ask, don't tell” wouldn't ignite a massive political firestorm, and that within minutes the mainstream Beltway press (including Quindlen's Newsweek colleagues) would be echoing the right-wing attacks on Obama from Fox News and talk radio?

I'm not suggesting just because the right wing would raise holy hell, that the Obama White House should not do x, y, or z. But it seems naive of Quindlen to pretend that all Obama has to do sign an executive order and poof! “don't ask, don't tell” would be gone and the “right wing” reaction would be muted and contained.