Democrats

The Democratic Fault Line

November 3, 2010 By Sean Murphy 12 Comments

So, fake tan is the new black?

How do I feel about the idiot winds that blew this astroturf tsunami over our land?

Eh…

Certainly, it sucks to see a party whose signal accomplishment of the last 24 months was to act petulant and say no like a talking point rendered Reductio ad absurdum. Way to go, guys (and gals), you got exactly what you hoped for and other than the collateral damage to your bought-and-sold souls, this won’t be anything but swell for you all (until it comes time to actually govern to the types of people you’ve attracted, who want to eat whatever they wish and not get fat, drink as much as they can and not get drunk, and earn as little as they can and still be…proud Americans, damit!).

Nobody likes a poor sport (that’s why I don’t like Republicans), so I’m content to let these nihilistic blowhards savor their smackdown. As always, you have to hand it to them: they said what they wanted to do, they predicted what they were going to do, and against all (well, not all, but all reasonable) probability, it worked. How it worked is the moral of this particular passion play –of which more shortly. And because we expect less than little from the intransigent GOP, how can you resent them for having the cowardice of their convictions? Particularly when the profiles in cowardice displayed by their political opposition is so…typical.

Yes, I come not to castigate conservatives, or take pot-shots at the tea partiers (it’s been done, and that market will remain bullish, not to mention bullshit-ish, for the foreseeable future). My concern is –and has been for some time– the ways in which the Democrats are congenitally incapable of articulating their achievements, and crafting a message that is either succinct, compelling or consistent. The shame of it is, all they have to do is tell the truth and it would set them (and the rest of us) free.

The lines are already, and predictably, being drawn in the sand. The sycophantic, supine and sensationalistic mainstream media can’t get to the scene of the crime quickly enough: Obama governed too far to the left (because moderate conservatism is the new far-Left)!

I see a lot of passion and animosity on both sides of this Democratic fault line, but whose fault is it?

First off, to echo the likes of the always reliable and amusing Mark Morford, any Dems who sat this one out, “on principle”, should feel very satisified and smug about their audacity of Nope. You really showed them this time, you clever little hipsters! It’s like 2000 only without Nader. If the polling data is remotely correct and a significant number of young voters simply didn’t show, that’s a disgrace: these spoiled brats should have thought long and hard about the difference between mediocrity & mendacity (Democrat TM) and incompetence & imperialism (that new and unimproved Republican Brand). For those of you coming off your parents’ health care plans in the next two years or no longer receiving allowance or beginning to grapple with those student loans, have fun with that. Also: enjoy that job search! Helpful hint: there are a lot of hungry tea-baggers and yes, they would like fries with that.

That said, the onus of this clusterfuck is, sadly but undeniably, squarely on Obama and his uninspired, uninformed and generally underwhelming team of super geniuses. For them to try and pin this one on the progressive base (as they began doing months ago, a harbinger of what was to come as well as an ugly insight into their almost-empty book of ideas), the same base that put in the time to get Obama elected (remember that slightly favored alternative, Hillary Clinton?), goes beyond disingenuous and approaches being outright despicable.

Let’s make it as clear as it can possibly be stated: Obama blew it.

(This doesn’t mean his presidency is over, or that yesterday’s results doom his prospects for re-election; indeed they may improve them in the long –and possibly the short– run; it simply means that what has happened thus far, and what it led to, begins and ends with him and the people he chose to surround himself with.)

For starters, let’s address the dreaded enthusiasm gap: after the fiasco in 2008, was there anyone (not on the GOP payroll) who felt warm and fuzzy about Wall Street or insurance companies? Yet those are the first two entities Obama got in bed with, and his uninspired, uninspiring “reforms” were the inevitable and unecessarily compromised outcomes of that grotesque alliance. Look at the video tapes: Obama has been more harsh with the progressive base, in word and deed, than he ever has been to Big Oil, Big Insurance, The Wizards of Wall St. or the weasels across the aisle, all of whom have used virtually every waking moment to malign and cripple him and his agenda. If you look at the accounts, each time public opinion was practically to the left of where Obama began his negotiations –not where the legislation ended up after the pork-fests and pocket-lining inside the sausage factory. As many others have pointed out, you can’t run as a progressive (we are the change we were waiting for?) and then govern to the right of Richard Nixon. (That said, just because Obama is one thousand times the man for the job McCain would have been, and his policies are a million times better than what the Republicans would want, is no reason to expect sentient, tax-paying voters to applaud this temerity. Guantanamo? Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Afghanistan? These aren’t the pipedreams of DailyKos disciples, these are the things Obama campaigned on.)

But let’s get to the real issue at hand. There is no question, none, that Obama had a once-in-a-century opportunity to harness all the uncertainty, anger and energy circa 2008 into doing something significant, and striking a lasting blow for the good. All it would have required was using this ultimate “teaching moment” to prove (and the proof existed anywhere he would have pointed) that deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthiest percentile, fighting unfunded (and, ahem, unpopular) wars and a steadily increasing chasm between the obscenely rich and the working poor put us precisely in the ditch we found ourselves trying to dig out of. That these anti-government obsessions (which, incidentally, unravelled during the Clinton era and should have been permanently put to bed, and probably could have been if Gore had won; thanks again young rebels!) are, in fact, the opposite of patriotic, they are in fact bad policy and utterly inconsistent with the blonde-haired and blue-eyed Jesus the religulous right ostensibly worships. That as FDR showed, government can be, and often is, a force for good, taxes pay for things we actually use, and putting people to work (not to mention avoiding additional and catastrophic layoffs) was the primary impetus of the (weakened, half-assed) stimulus. Oh, and Obama didn’t raise taxes: he cut taxes! Did you get sick of being reminded about that? I didn’t, because I wasn’t.

It’s not that difficult to imagine: one speech, early in ’09, wherein Obama declared: “not only am I going to fund these projects, no American who wants to work will go without on my watch. I’m going to spend this money, because it is an investment on people, and you will be able to measure the results immediately. This is an investment on behalf of our well-being, and if you want to judge me in four years, I will take those odds. And if I’m wrong, the worst case scenario will be an early retirement where I can drive across this great nation over new roads and rebuilt bridges, and take advantage of the radically improved infrastructure that these projects made possible. I’ll walk away from the Oval Office happy and proud, because I’ll know we made a difference, and that is what I was elected to do.”

Instead, he surrounded himself with the exact same charlatans who oversaw the Wall Street (and housing) implosion and ignored economists like Paul Krugman whose chief fault is that he has been right, about everything, all along. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t do the right thing, it’s that he wouldn’t do the right thing. The question still remains: could he do the right thing? Just because Democratic policies make sense, it doesn’t mean the politicians we elect are sensible. On what planet would you put Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, who still had blood and feathers on their face, in charge of the fiscal hen-house? That was an early sign that the best and the brightest were, in an Obama administration, about to become the unseen and the silenced. If you are late to the party, I can’t recommend the heavy lifting that Matt Taibbi has been doing the last two years highly enough: read him and weep.

Obama was either too clueless or (worse) arrogant to believe he actually needed to make a case, and be ready to fight back against the full-scale war the GOP declared on him the second he was elected. (His refusal to bother himself getting involved in the health care brawls all summer of 2009 is the second largest blunder of his presidency: he not only allowed the do-nothing Repubs to define the narrative (wrongly), he let the Tea Party lunatics get a foothold and, with the lack of any consistent, intelligible message, determine that opposing the government was the correct, and patriotic thing to do. By the time he saw the gramatically-challenged writing on the signs, it was arguably too late. Worse, he apparently considered the battle won once the (weak and watered down) health care bill squeaked through last Spring. That was when he (and the mostly useless, or at least unused Biden) should have been making the stops, explaining why it was good (or at least better than Nothing) and what he would continue to do. Instead, he refused to get in “campaign mode”. Meanwhile, against all probability, the masses with their pitchforks and flames, had –for lack of a tangible target for the ire– latched on to the Fox-spewed propaganda filling the inexplicable vaccum of what passes for political discourse.

Put another way: for all his wasted potential and self-inflicted peccadilloes, do you think Slick Willy would have fumbled this one? Are you shitting me? He probably had a recurring fantasy, while in office, that he could have walked into a crisis like the one Obama inherited in order to impose his will. He probably dreamt of getting all up in that sumbitch and working the change from the inside, crawling out of the rotten carcass with grime in his hair and a shit-eating smirk on his face. That rascal would have remained on message and ensured that his people were hammering home the Truth every day. It still astonishes me that Obama (and a great many of the feckless, scared-of-their-shadow Dems) didn’t begin every sentence these past 24 months with the observation “Well, it’s a challenge, but remember: the Republicans had almost unfettered control for the last eight years and this is what happened; we hope nobody ever forgets it.”

Even today, in his uninspired (and, for true believers, truly frightening) news conference, Obama just can’t bring himself to invoke FDR. Remember “I welcome their hatred”? What part of that does he not understand? Did you see Obama on Jon Stewart last week? “Yes we can, but…” Wow. Ill-considered decisions and mistakes aside, day truly is night if the one thing Obama could count on –his rhetorical majesty– has so utterly deserted him. And whether or not you believe a more provocative, even confrontational commander-in-chief could have yielded better results (I did, and do), if you think some (many?) of the on-the-fence moderates (the same sorts who voted for George W. Bush because he was the kind of guy they could enjoy a (near) beer with) would not have appreciated some decisive rhetoric (or decisiveness, period), particularly if it was spoken with a modicum of authenticity, you are either irretrievably cynical or hopelessly naive.

This is the rub: does Obama have it in him? Does he really care? Does he, as late as today, even get it?

Would a more progressive acumen have made a difference? We’ll never know. But it seems sufficiently clear that the (mostly welcome) fate of the craven Blue Dogs underscores, once again (will they never learn?) that being Republican-Lite is not the answer. Indeed, it is the proven recipe for disaster and will continue to be in our increasingly debased political culture. It’s hard enough to fight against these fuckwads; it certainly doesn’t do you any favors when you do their work for them.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Bob Marley, Democrats, Jon Stewart, Mark Morford, Obama, Paul Krugman, Republicans, Tea Party

A View To A Kill or, It’s The End of the World As We Knew It (And I Feel Fine)

March 26, 2010 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Here’s how bad it’s gotten: David Frum , the dude who used to write speeches for the worst president we’ve ever endured, has written the most lacerating epitaph for The (Tea) Party of No, here. The entire thing is a must-read, and the closing paragraph demands to be quoted in full:

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Here is the really ugly part: Frum is not Monday morning quarterbacking. He was practically pleading with anyone who would listen how (self) destructive this unified and unyielding obstruction would be in both the short and long term. In fairness, the G.O.P. had deluded itself into thinking that the fantasy they were spinning was gold, not shit. And there were plenty of cowards and co-opted folks in the media and inside the Democratic party who still hadn’t figured out how to stand up to bullies. (Instant update and mid-post edit: holy shit, look who just got “terminated” by AEI. You really can’t script this stuff better, and how made-to-order this full-scale Republican implosion is unfolding. Can you say MISSION ACCOMPLISHED? Holy shit.)

Of course this problem was exacerbated in no small measure by Obama himself being way too cool and detached on the sidelines as the Fox News and RNC fear factories spewed out their garbage and took control of the narrative (and I’ll never forget, or forgive the cynical and craven Rahm Emanuel for folding like a shanty house in a hurricane the second Scott Brown pulled off his big upset in Massachussetts). Finally, at almost the last possible second, Obama joined the fray, inspired more by the need for survival than anything else. But to his eternal credit, he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. As we saw, the results were immediately apparent and quite positive.

Can we now, at long last, acknowledge what many of us suspected all along: the bill was never “wildly unpopular” with the general public. Or, to put a finer point on it, more than a little of that disenchantment was actually coming from Democrats who (correctly) felt the bill was not strong enough. But, as many of us suspected all along, when push came to shove of course they would endorse even a rather weak and watered down bill for two primary reasons. One, virtually any bill was better than the alternative the G.O.P. was offering, which was nothing (well, more tax cuts). And two, the Republicans absolutely meant it when they bragged that killing health reform would kill Obama’s presidency. In hindsight, if only a handful of Republicans had crossed the aisle, it’s likely the bill would have failed. By doubling down on the obstinance they have practically patented at this point the Republicans essentially dared the Democrats to pull together and see this through. Without that total, and arrogant, defiance, I’m not at all certain the Dems, famous for their inability to do anything, would have gotten the ball across the goal line.

As always, the so-called Liberal Media was about as useless as usual (and their general incompetence increases in direct proportion to the overall degeneracy of our political discourse). Obsessed with the trivial horse-race aspects of who won the most recent news cycle, and handicapping the odds and chances of whether some bill (any bill) might pass, they did less than a little to help dispel the truly hysterical talking points and outright falsehoods the right wing noise machine was expelling into the air.

And here is what I said to a friend last week: “If/when this bill actually passes you are going to quickly see the shameless media transition from the Obama’s presidency is doomed! meme to the Obama back on track! and all of a sudden we would begin to once again hear the t-word (transformative) associated with his presidency. In fairness, both of those assumptions are more or less accurate: if the bill had failed, it would have emboldened the Republicans and further intimidated the feckless Democrats (and we likely would have seen increased –and detrimental– influence from that paper tiger Rahm Emanuel); on the other hand, with the bill passing, it allows Obama and his party to regain (and more importantly, articulate) the narrative. Both parties knew what was at stake, although it (typically) took the Dems about eight months too long to feel the necessary urgency. For this alone, the oft-ridiculed Harry Reid should get his moment in the sun and be properly lauded for hanging in there and doing a ton of heavy, often thankless lifting. Likewise, Nancy Pelosi has gone from being a controversial figure to an instant legend: she, like Obama, was overlooked and underestimated, and it came back to bite her opponents in a big way. And man must that bite sting.

Lo and behold, look what happened to those opinion polls, literally overnight. Kind of hard to say the “majority” of Americans hated this bill, huh? And more importantly, that was always a bogus formulation. It was pretty obvious to anyone not at a tea party or on the NRCC payroll that more than a little of that antipathy was coming from the left. These folks (quite understandably) believed the bill was not strong enough: they (we) knew that this same bill was arguably to the right of what Nixon advocated in the early ’70s (!) and it was certainly close, if not a tad milder than what Bob Dole endorsed less than two decades ago (!!). Regardless, we understood that when putsch came to shove, (something made infinitely easier courtesy of the Republicans’ very vocal and uninhibited declaration that their sole intention was to stand as one in obstruction to the bill, and Obama) many of them would unite in support of this initiative. And that’s pretty much what happened.

So what about the independent voters?

Well, this coveted and often capricious demographic generally makes or breaks a sitting president and his legislation. How bad will the mid-terms be for the Dems? I felt they never would have been nearly as bad as many were predicting last month (or last week for that matter); I feel the prospects are much better now. In part because today, as much as ever, perception is reality: Obama (and this bill) is a winner. Equally important, people do tend to appreciate a leader who can get things accomplished. That he hung in there and did something presidents have been attempting to achieve for almost a century is also a self-fulfilling historical narrative. Obama has injected life, meaning and import into his first term.

To the victor go the spoils, history is written by the winners, etc. But it’s more (and less) than that: just as the fairly hysterical media coverage post-Brown did not paint an accurate portrayal of what was really going on, or what was likely to happen, the surprise passage of HCR is not going to transform moderates into liberals. It doesn’t need to. Unless the bill begins rescinding peoples’ coverage because of pre-existing conditions or bankrupting families who can’t pay their bills (oh wait, that’s what is already happening), it stands to reason that HCR will never be more unpopular than it was last Saturday. After Sunday, the bill can only get more popular in direct proportion to the number of people who realize it’s not only not the end of the world, but actually a pretty swell thing. This transformation is already underway(not just the big shift in public opinion in recent polls); each day that goes by without any of the more outrageous Republican predictions coming true is another opportunity for T&R (Truth and Reality) to vanquish the hysteria.

There was a good reason Karl Rove lost his shit on Sunday while David Plouffe toyed with him (and showed, about ten years too late, the most effective way to defuse this braying rodeo clown). Rove knew what everyone else on his team was figuring out: they threw everything they had, and everything they could possibly fabricate, in the monomaniacal pursuit of defeating HCR. And they still lost. The reason they wanted to beat it so badly was not because The Party Of No has the best interests of anyone at heart; it’s because they knew this would be political gold for Obama, and Dems for decades. Think about it for a second: if they even half-believed a fraction of the dire repercussions they were robotically shrieking about, they would have happily gotten out of the way and let Obama have his way. Because, if it was going to be so awful, and it was so clearly against the will of most Americans, the Dems would pay a very dear price for their assumptions. Of course, what is becoming increasingly clear, from the stimulus to HCR, is that during one of the worst years Americans have endured since The Big D, Democrats have scrambled and strategized to make things better while The Party Of No has held their breath, sucked their thumbs and egged on the worst elements of the lunatic fringe that now bolsters their base.

It’s a loaded term, particularly in light of the very recent outbreaks of violence, threats and manufactured outrage, but a day of reckoning is imminent. And it’s not for the party being targeted by this illiterate mob of mouth-breathing imbeciles; it will be for the party that has cynically, and eagerly, stoked the flames of this tea party silliness. These idiots were useful for the farcical “town hall meetings” (speaking of manufactured outrage, and an unhealthy dose of straight-up racism), and to provide flesh to bolster the dubious proclamations about how unpopular health care reform was/is. Now that the battle is over, and now that so many of these “real Americans” have exposed themselves for who they really are, it’s going to be difficult for the G.O.P. to disown them at the very moment that their association may finally be unwelcome.

But, as the song goes, breaking up is hard to do. It was truly disgusting to see the contemptible Eric Cantor go from expressing tepid disapproval at reports of violence and paranoid hostility to shifting the blame to Democrats. Look, one need only read this blog (filed under “Politics”) to see that I have few qualms calling out my own side for its inanity, incompetence and self-absorption whenever it’s warranted. But at this particular moment in time, there is no getting around the fact that one party alone is associated with this ugliness. That violence is being encouraged is a repugnant enough thing; that it’s underscored by explicit racist, homophobic, nationalistic rhetoric is another. That this racist, homophobic, nationalistic rhetoric is funneled out ’round the clock by a major propaganda machine disguised as a “news” network is yet another. That a major political party is applauding and abetting this sewage is still another. That it has been kicked up a notch by that party’s recent VP candidate finally begs the question: is there a bottom here? At what point does a semblance of shame or propriety or, when all else fails, the impetus for political survival override this insanity?

As always, only time will tell. In the meantime, it’s equal parts encouraging and appalling to see what’s left of the Republican Party doubling down on denial and the fake fury that is born out of fear. For the sake of all our moral and responsible citizens, let’s hope they continue racing furiously in the other direction while Democrats –and the future of progress they represent –leave them in this moribund fantasy land of their own making.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: David Frum, Democrats, HCR, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, Republicans, Tea Party

It’s (Still) Not Only About Obama

October 13, 2009 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

obama-superman

The Nobel Peace Prize –and the general sense of optimism and expectation– is not only about Obama. This was true before the election and it’s true now.

In addition to an overdue but thorough repudiation of Republican incompetence, Obama’s landslide was more about the majority than the man. This belabors the obvious, today, but it’s instructive to recall the folks (and there were lots of them) who were convinced of two things back in ’08: one, that Hillary Clinton represented the best chance for Democratic victory; and two, Obama had no chance to win. That he did was not only historic on multiple fronts, but tempted many in the country to reach the optimistic, if premature conclusion that race relations had turned the corner. While it’s obvious that a fair chunk of the population would diametrically oppose Obama no matter what, it only takes a cursory examination of the tactics and tenor of their resistance to understand the bile simmering centimeters beneath the surface. Nevertheless, what some people ascertained early in the Obama/Clinton face-off was that Hillary had the unenviable prospects of having about half the country hate her, before she even took office. At least it’s taken Obama a few months of not miraculously resuscitating the economy he inherited (even Superman, for all his unparalleled powers, was not able to create jobs) to earn some skepticism. But his ability to appeal to the moderates and middle-of-the-roaders was the key ingredient of his electoral success. And that possibility, beyond the charisma and the eloquence, was what propelled the audacity to hope.

Naturally, news of Obama’s Nobel Prize is going to explode the empty heads of the haters, but it will also give the mouth-breathers a new outrage to rally around. Let’s stop and pause at the irony: for the better part of eight years Dems worked themselves into a lather with every new Bush embarrassment; for the past eight months each Obama accolade is treated like an act of treason. Actually, there is not much irony there at all –the same idiots who held their breath like infants during the Clinton years (years that look better and better in hindsight) and marched lockstep with every Bush decision that set the country back, now throwing tea-party tantrums while Obama tries to clean up the playpen he inherited.

Tea_party_2

To be fair, whoever was willing (much less able) to tackle the myriad obstacles Bush & Co. left in the way is worthy of an award. But let there be no mistake: Obama’s honor is very much a repudiation of Bush’s hideous legacy. And if this is seen by the howling twits on the Right as a big “F You” from the rest of the world, it’s small recompense for the eight year “F You” the previous administration offered the world, to everyone’s detriment. (Speaking of those twits, enough can’t be said about how eagerly they seek to place our foreign and domestic disasters at Obama’s feet even though they vocally endorsed the decisions that led to this state of affairs.)

And that is the most disgraceful development: I’ve yet to hear many condemnations of the demonstrably failed policies of the Bush years. That is because there have been very few of them. Most of the post-mortems have appraised the political failures. And therein lies the rub: Bush stopped being popular and more importantly, Bush stopped winning, therefore his legacy is tarnished in the fickle, always opportunistic eyes of those who once ardently endorsed him. The actual recklessness and depravity of the policies have not been reevaluated or disowned; indeed, their supporters have doubled down on them (see last year’s election).

To be certain, the hardcore right-wing offered tepid support for McCain not only because he was such a woefully inadequate candidate (that is the sane view; the insider GOP view was that he had no chance to win, therefore his embrace by the powers-that-be was never more than lukewarm) but also that he wasn’t a real Republican. He sought compromise and he was viewed as too often too willing to work with the other party to get things accomplished. This shows you the diminishing returns of bipartisanship, circa Y2K: McCain’s scarcely heroic public stance against torture or his reluctance to offer full-throated support to the cretinous scaremongering that passes for Republican discourse on immigration hardly made him a moderate. But in today’s GOP, it does. And that is why Obama was elected, and why –despite the predictable and appalling fecklessness of so many elected Democrats — the Republican brand is at a nadir of sorts (don’t mistake the millions of citizens disgusted by the Wall Street shenanigans or the unemployment numbers –directly brought about by Bush’s domestic policies — as any sort of endorsement of a return to Republican rule).

bush-shoe-dodge

It is imperative to recognize, and point out as often as necessary, that the same sadists pulling the strings in the not-so-big GOP tent are mostly angry and embarrassed because they got beaten last November. There has been nothing approximating a concerned or sober investigation of what went so dreadfully wrong as a result of bellicose foreign policy, the reckless (and expensive) launch of an unnecessary war, or the thoroughly debunked and shameful worship of free-market, voodoo economics. In this regard what passes for the Republican intelligentsia is quite identical to the flat-earth imbeciles who insist, even as the evidence otherwise piles up all around them, that Jesus was white and dinosaurs ambled about the Garden of Eden and the world is only a few thousand years old.

Even now, as unemployment numbers rise alongside escalating health care costs, you have right-wing scribes advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest half-percent and an intolerance for reform that undercuts the very principle of free market economics (Is it not a self-defeating argument that the same party who clamors for the inviolable advantages of competition suddenly opposes it in this one instance? Is it not more than a little revealing that the same big government they ridicule suddenly poses such a menacing threat to the insurance industry?) This is the one argument that reveals the hollow core of the Republican machinery: if any of these folks actually believed in the economic principles they espouse, they would reluctantly have no choice but to acknowledge that the public option epitomizes the theory of market competition in practice. But, naturally, the ideology can be adjusted as necessary (just like the anti-deficit hawks made no noise when the Iraq debacle and the immoral tax cut policy put the entire country deep into the red), and this brazen hypocrisy makes it impossible to ever take these people seriously, if anyone ever did.

In regards to foreign policy –and it is in this capacity that Obama is inspiring the world community, and the impetus behind his Nobel Prize– it is tempting to simply propose that any developments that rankle the rogues gallery below is inherently worthwhile.

Look at those faces again, and remember what they wrought. Just getting these sociopaths out of positions of power and influence is a substantial accomplishment.

On the other hand:

Those images are a sobering reminder of where we’ve been, and where we still are.

The most patient (and/or gullible) Obama endorsers keep reminding us that the president has a lot on his plate, and this much-vaunted change will take time. Okay, so how much time does he need? This is the same man who vowed to shut down Guantanamo on Day One, and end the farce known as “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. The fierce urgency of now quickly became the urgent ferocity of political ass-covering. And it would be one thing if the people Obama was inclined to infuriate (and they will be infuriated) represented anything approximating a majority, or anything more than a small minority. As it is, he’s avoiding making easy, sane and moral decisions to…appease the same lunatics who are already calling him a traitor and a socialist? It makes about as much sense as Michelle Bachmann.

And it is because of his extreme caution, and his infuriating equivocations on such no-brainers as gay marriage that the concern about Obama’s Nobel Prize is warranted. Not the superficial and trumped up consternation from the Right; but rather, the creeping skepticism on those from the Left (those who just today were dismissed by a typically anonymous chickenshit inside the administration as the “fringe left”). Talk about biting the hands that pulled the lever for you! I understand –somewhat– Obama’s foot-dragging on Guantanamo (perhaps once the health care debate is mostly sorted out it will be time to fight that battle, albeit way too late), but his cowardice on equal rights for all citizens is unconscionable and indefensible. It would be lame enough if this was a demographically polarizing issue (as it was during Clinton’s first term) but the fact that a majority of the people are behind this long overdue action makes Obama’s sluggishness a disgrace.

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And there are some of us who are mortified by the prospect that Obama is now standing on the shoulders of his most loyal supporters to fortify his bulwark of prudent calculation. That is not what he was elected for, and it will be an unacceptable turn of events if, not a year into his first term, he is already more worried about his second term than the promises he made to get him in office. It’s almost enough to make one wish for the tooth and nail trench warfare we might have expected from a Hillary Clinton one-and-done term in office (because don’t kid yourself, Hillary would never have a chance at re-election, in part because she would exhaust all of her political capital just staying afloat, yet that 24/7 offensive might provide the required ferocity to affect some meaningful change). Put another way, I’d much rather have a bruising and contentious four year term that actually yielded some change we can believe in than eight years of triangulated calculation, unfulfilled promise and sweet but ultimately empty rhetoric.

Perhaps a wake-up call is necessary: Obama, by all evidence, is a moderate, and he has said and done little to convince anyone otherwise. And if this is the best we can expect, it’s unfortunate but far from the end of the world (again, always keep in mind the alternatives the other party had on offer, and by all accounts is still offering). I’m still mostly content to hang back and reserve judgment and consider both the man and his presidency a work in progress. Concern is, to my mind, entirely warranted and a good measure of healthy skepticism is required. And yet. Considering, once again, the almost inconceivable cataclysm he walked into, and the fact that we are –by any mature measure– much better off than we could (or would) have been, there’s no need for the Dems to eat their own, as usual. Not yet. We have the luxury of keeping Obama accountable in part because he didn’t let us fall off the cliff this year. And that is quite worth keeping front and center in the year(s) ahead. Also, for all we know, events that are underway and far from fruition could turn out to be both historic and heroic, in hindsight. We’ll see. My bet is that the president will more than earn this premature encomium in the hard years ahead.

Nonetheless, if Obama is half the man History is setting him up to be, he is right to be humbled and he would do well to dedicate all of his energy and eloquence toward making good on the promises he already made. We can hope for more, but we should expect no less.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Bush, Democrats, Don't Ask Don't Tell, Guantánamo, Health Care Reform, Nobel Prize, Obama, Tea Party