Your accounting of the Byron plant story drastically oversimplifies the actual events. It casts Obama as somehow central to the story when, again, he had virtually no formal oversight over nuclear regulation. It attempts to read tea leaves about Obama's mentality out of the progress of pushing a bill --- itself a meaningless political reaction to an event in his backyard, a sop to his constituents --- past stiff opposition, as if the alternative to "watering down" this bill was strong new legislation on nuclear regs, which of course it wasn't.
In short, it attempts to make Obama the go-along get-along energy-insider-pol "bad guy" in a story that not only has no good guys or bad guys, but also almost nothing at all to do with Obama.
"My" accounting is derived entirely from what I read in that New York Times article. I'm not clear if you're criticizing my read of the article, or the article itself. If the latter, do you have any other accounts that provide further detail? The vehemence of your responses suggests you might live in the area?
when, again, he had virtually no formal oversight over nuclear regulation
Elected members of a representative democracy are charged with producing the legislation that defines "formal oversight", and with using feedback from their constituents to do so. Who else should his aggrieved constituents have turned to in this case?
go-along get-along energy-insider-pol "bad guy"
Not really. His behavior is typical of politicians across the board (except the ones who don't get elected). I agree with you that his legislation might be characterized as "a sop to his constituents". This doesn't make him one of the bad guys, it just means he is not the leftist demagogue/messiah some make him out to be.
attempts to read tea leaves about Obama's mentality
Sure, I think this is fair game. He (like his predecessor) is a bit of a cipher.
Anyway, this thread started because you asked me what I saw in common between the two articles. That's what I saw in common. YMMV.
I live in Chicago, which is an hour or so from Rockford. I didn't actually manage to extract a "here's what Obama is about" narrative from the NYT article. Here's what I think:
• Take anything Obama touched during his time in the Senate.
• Note that we still have that problem. For instance: immigration, border security, mines, spending transparency, no-bid contracting, nonproliferation, and (of course) peace in West Asia. (Note how I cheated by reading 1 Wikipedia graf to generate that list. You could broaden the list by finding things he did in the Senate that weren't notable because they went nowhere.)
• For bonus points, find some large organization that contributes uniformly to major political candidates of one or both parties that is relevant to the problem Obama attempted to solve.
• Write a message board post with the same narrative as your original post.
It's an interesting summation of your perspective, thanks. You depict Obama as one molecule in a sort of political Brownian motion, with me & the Times acting as a cherry-picking Maxwell's Demon.
A hard thesis to disprove, and I'll let it go from here. But I'll note that in contrast to the examples in your list (with the possible issue of no-bid contracting, I don't know about this), this tritium issue was local, raised by Obama's constituents. Also, "Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceed[ed] its support for any other presidential candidate."
It seems to me a 99.99999% near absolute certainty that he'd have been nowhere near nuclear regulation if this hadn't happened in his back yard. Which makes it, to my mind, a pretty silly thing to try to mine for insight. Any senator from any state would have had to react somehow to an incident like that.
In short, it attempts to make Obama the go-along get-along energy-insider-pol "bad guy" in a story that not only has no good guys or bad guys, but also almost nothing at all to do with Obama.