Is President Obama a bank-bashing populist or a capitalist sympathetic to CEO bonuses? It's a question, explored here, too abstract to be answered definitively. But that hasn't stopped people from rigorously arguing it since Obama first stepped into office. With the Obama administration still hoping to implement financial reform--or not--it's a question with real policy implications.

Liberal blogger Digby is pretty sure where she stands--he "doesn't understand the very real angst out in the country," she writes--but she looks much deeper to ask why pundits are so confused about where Obama's sympathy lies. It seems the president has been giving mixed signals in interviews and in pursuit of policy.

Obama's "one from column A and one from column B" approach has always frustrated me, but I think it's really starting to take its toll. At this point, he just seems bipolar not bipartisan, ranting about wall street one day and saying that Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon are jolly good fellows who deserve their obscene bonuses the next. Do they think that nobody notices --- or just feel in their bones -- that he's trying to be all things to all people? I don't think it inspires confidence.

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