Kemstone's Journal

Like most progressives, I liked what President Obama had to say in his budget speech last Wednesday. For the last two years I’ve been criticizing him for never standing up and making his case to the American people, so when he finally does that I have to give him some credit. He argued that the government does have a role to play in society, that we as Americans ought to not just look out for ourselves but our fellow citizens as well, and that dealing with our economic problems should require sacrifices from the wealthy and not just the middle class. He finally went after the Republicans for claiming that we can afford massive tax-cuts for the rich while simultaneously demanding drastic deficit reductions, and he pointed out that the rich are doing quite well these days and they ought to be expected to pay their fair share. He vowed not to extend the Bush tax-cuts again, and he said he would protect social safety nets like Medicare, which the Republicans are now planning to ‘reform’ (i.e. kill it in order to “save” it).

Unfortunately, while President Obama did make a lot of good points, he made them at 1 o’clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, he didn’t make them very forcefully, and it seemed that nobody noticed except the usual TV pundits and bloggers whose job is to follow this stuff closely. They all agree that this was basically the first speech of Obama’s 2012 campaign, but it doesn’t seem like anyone heard it.

But it was a good speech and a good sign that the president isn’t going to drift as far to the political right as some of us have feared. If he remains president, we should be able to expect the expiration of the Bush tax-cuts, and we should be able to rest relatively safe knowing that programs like Social Security and Medicare will remain intact. Those reasons alone are good enough to vote for Obama over a Republican in 2012.

But I can’t help but seriously temper my optimism by looking at Obama’s campaigning/governing pattern so far and noticing the glaring differences between his rhetoric and his actions. If I ask myself, “Is this the kind of message I want from the president?” the answer is yes. But if I ask, “Does this represent a fundamental shift in the president’s governing strategy?” I’d have to say no. It was refreshing to hear him stand up and make some progressive arguments, but it’s not like he’s never made progressive arguments before—he did that all the way through the 2008 campaign, and back then he did it far more forcefully.

It was to be expected that once the re-election campaign kicked into gear, we’d start to see a little of the old Obama again. As I’ve mentioned many times on this blog, most Americans take the liberal/progressive position on virtually every political issue, so it’s politically smart to run a campaign as a progressive—as long as you can privately assure your Big Money donors that you’re not actually that progressive. Once you win the election and get into office, you’re free to move as far to the right as you like (and when your political opponents are as close to the fringe as the Republicans are, you can move very far to the right indeed).

I don’t need to make another laundry list of the things Obama promised he would do as a candidate and then backed down from as president. The only thing I need to mention is his promise to let the Bush tax-cuts expire. He tells us now that when the fight over those tax-cuts comes up again next year, this time he’ll refuse to cave in to the Republicans. Forgive me for quoting Bush, but “Fool me once, shame on…shame on…”

I’m not too excited about what I heard from Obama in his speech because it’s nothing new. I’ve always liked his speeches, I’ve always come away from them thinking that he’s on my side and he’s sincere in what he says. Then he goes and cuts back-room deals with Republicans and corporate power-players and I wonder what the hell happened to that guy who gave those awesome speeches.

The real litmus test for whether or not Obama is actually changing course in his approach to governing is coming soon, in the battle over raising the debt ceiling. Everyone who knows anything about economics says that for America to default on its debt would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions. The Republicans are getting ready to threaten to plunge the country (and the rest of the world with it) into another major economic crisis if the president doesn’t give them exactly what they want.

My guess is, the president won’t shift tactics at all. He’ll act like the Republicans are actually serious about doing it (when in reality they wouldn’t dare because their Wall Street masters wouldn’t let them) and cough up a bunch of spending cuts on programs for the poor and middle-class before finally reaching a deal at the eleventh hour.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and this time he’ll actually call the Republicans’ bluff and refuse to give up any more cuts that would hurt the middle-class. I certainly hope so, but I just don’t see that happening. His whole strategy is to appear as moderate and willing-to-compromise as possible, so he’ll compromise even when he doesn’t have to. He knows he can win re-election simply by telling progressives what they want to hear, and by moving just as far to the right of the center as he can in order to attract independents. He knows how far to the right the Tea Party has pushed the Republicans, and it’s his best electoral advantage. He might tell progressives nice things, but he doesn’t actually have to do anything for them because they’ll have no viable alternative.

Meanwhile, he still needs those Big Money campaign donations, so he’ll make sure to continue protecting the establishment and maintaining the broken system as is.

The only way for us to truly change things is by reforming the way campaigns are financed, but that’s only going to happen from a grassroots level, and unfortunately I don’t see such a movement really picking up steam before the next election.

No matter who wins in 2012, the American people will lose. The only decision we’ll have is over how painful that loss is going to be.

I’ve remained silent on the Libya issue until now for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that it’s taken me a long time to settle on a position. Even now my opinion is highly nuanced and subject to change as the situation develops and more information comes to light. Normally I’ll only write a blog post when I feel very strongly about something or I have an opinion that I don’t see being expressed much elsewhere, but since this is a rather significant event in modern American history I feel obliged to write down my thoughts even if they’re neither unique nor firmly held.

The question of whether the United States should have gotten involved in the conflict between Gadhafi and the rebels seeking to overthrow him can be approached from two basic standpoints: intentions and consequences. If we take the stated intentions of President Obama at face-value, it seems we did the right thing going in. Gadhafi did promise to murder many thousands of his own people, and if the prevention of genocide isn’t a justifiable reason to use military force then I don’t know what is. I think we have a moral obligation to prevent genocide wherever and whenever we can.

However, it’s hard to justify intervening in Libya when we didn’t also intervene in Rwanda, the Sudan, and Darfur. It calls our motives into question when we selectively intervene like this, and the fact that Libya has oil while these other countries don’t taints the entire moral calculation as to whether or not our intentions here are correct.

But when all is said and done, oil or no oil, consistency or inconsistency, I think it’s better to have done something than to have done nothing. As one commentator said, I’d rather prevent some genocide some of the time than to prevent no genocide any time.

As for judging the rightness of our actions based on the consequences, this is almost impossible at this early stage. We may help the rebels topple Gadhafi and pave the way for a bourgeoning democracy, in which case history will judge our actions quite kindly. We might fail to oust Gadhafi and genocide will occur anyway, in which case all we’ll have done is waste a lot of resources. And we might find ourselves locked in yet another quagmire from which we can’t seem to extract ourselves no matter how many allies initially went in with us, in which case we’ll have another Iraq- or Afghanistan-like situation on our hands and we’ll have to judge Obama just as harshly as we judged Bush for getting us into a mess with no clear plan for getting us out.

But for now, we seem to have prevented Gadhafi from murdering thousands of his own people, so from a standpoint of consequences I would still judge our actions correct at the moment.

Of course it’s even more complicated when you consider some of the side-issues involved here. For one, I think we did the right thing by acting under the banner of the United Nations, letting France make the first move and handing off leadership as soon as possible. The last thing we want is to reinforce the perception of those in the Muslim world that we’ll use any excuse we can to drop bombs on Muslim countries. I think that if we play our cards right, this could really help us change the narrative of Muslim perceptions of the United States. In this case, at least, we are siding with the people against their brutal dictator. If we did this more consistently, I think it would be a far more effective tactic in the “war on terror” than any occupation ever could.

However, we can’t escape the possibility that this whole thing could backfire. If we help the rebels topple Gadhafi and then pull out and say, “you’re on your own” and the situation descends into chaos and violence, we might very well be blamed. Once you extend your hand to help one side win a fight, it could look very bad for us to pull our hand away when the initial fight is over. Conversely, if we stick around to help the freed Libyans in the aftermath of their revolution, we could be perceived as once again meddling in affairs we have no business sticking our noses in. Making sure this is a multi-national operation will help to mitigate that perception, but I worry we may soon find ourselves in a lose-lose situation.

Then there’s the issue of whether Barack Obama should have sought congressional approval for this military action. I am personally very uncomfortable with the idea of the imperial presidency, so I would have liked to see some discussion about this before we went in. I don’t like how the president can just plunge our nation into an international conflict without giving our representatives a chance to debate the merits in public and the media a chance to delve into the details for the sake of the public’s understanding.

From a pragmatist’s standpoint, however, I understand why this particular president would have chosen to bypass this particular congress at this particular moment in American politics. The Republicans will seize any opportunity to weaken the president no matter what the consequences, and handing them a chance to obstruct this military action for the sake of scoring political points would not have been worth the potential loss of tens of thousands of Libyan lives. Still, I would rather have seen some more discussion about this before we went in, and I’m very wary of the idea that any future president can bomb any country for any reason without seeking the approval of the American people in any way.

The final point I want to make is perhaps the only opinion I hold with 100% conviction, and that is that every American with a shred of respect for logic has to admit that the Republican Party has no interest in either ideological consistency or what is best for this country. I don’t think anyone who is honest with themselves could believe that had George W. Bush done the exact same thing in this situation, the Republicans who are currently criticizing Obama wouldn’t have supported him 100%. It should be abundantly clear to any rational person that Republicans and the commentators on Fox News will criticize Obama for anything, for any reason, no matter how much it contradicts positions they’ve previously held.

Either he shouldn’t have intervened at all, he should have intervened sooner, or in Newt Gingrich’s case both—depending on which day you ask. Some who cheered for the Iraq invasion now jeer American intervention as though they’ve always been opposed to it. Some who derided anyone who criticized Bush’s policies at a time of war as “unpatriotic” and accused them of “demoralizing the troops” are the very same people who are now criticizing Obama’s policies at a time or war. Somehow it doesn’t “embolden the enemy” to criticize a Democratic president at a time of war, only a Republican.

And last but certainly not least by far—any Republican who called for intervention (either before or after the actual intervention) should be forced to explain to the American people why we can afford to pay for foreign military campaigns but we have to cut pay for middle-class workers, take away food stamps and heating assistance from the poor, slash Social Security and Medicare, de-fund NPR, bust up the unions, and do all of these other things they insist we must do for the sake of “fiscal responsibility”. If we can afford to send hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles to Northern Africa, I think we can afford to hand out a few food stamps.

So these are my thoughts on the Libya question at this point in time. I rarely support the president these days, but on this one I think he did the right thing (although I do have my reservations about his failure to involve Congress). I’m not an ideological pacifist or an isolationist—I do think violence can be justified to prevent more violence and I do think stronger nations ought to defend weaker ones—and I think this falls into the narrow category of morally justifiable military actions. I just wish we were more consistent.

Lately I just haven’t been able to summon the will to write about politics. I know there’s important stuff going on but I just don’t have much to say about any of it and I’m all-too-conscious of the fact that nobody really cares about my opinion anyway.

The revolutionary movements taking hold throughout the Middle East are a great thing in my opinion, but not knowing much about each individual country there’s not much more I can say that I haven’t already said in my posts about Tunisia and Egypt.

The protests taking place now in Wisconsin over the governor’s union-busting proposal are also a very positive development (the establishment is finally being reminded that conservatives aren’t the only Americans willing to take to the streets) and could potentially be a landmark event in American history, but there’s nothing I have to say about it that isn’t already being said, and I honestly don’t know enough about the inner workings of labor unions to say anything particularly intelligent about it anyway.

As for Barack Obama, he’s doing the same “look at how centrist I am” dance that he’s been doing since he took office, and I’ve said all I have to say about it a million times over. It also seems that every time I write a post critical of Obama I lose a few readers :)

The Republicans are engaging in their typical hypocritical behavior, talking about creating jobs but focusing mostly on making it harder for women to get abortions.

And all but a select few in the media are letting both parties get away with talking about spending cuts without ever suggesting that maybe the deficit wouldn’t be such a huge problem if they didn’t just give out $800 billion worth of tax-cuts, mostly to the richest 2%. The entire Washington establishment and corporate media seem to be engaging in some kind of cooperative selective amnesia. The poor and middle class have to make sacrifices because the government just doesn’t have enough money, but nobody dares to point out that we wouldn’t have to cut so deeply if the rich were to just pay their fair share.

Last but not least, the main source of the information that led us to war in Iraq has admitted to lying, and even though the Bush administration had every reason in the world not to trust him back then they still went to war anyway and this story is getting almost no attention at all. The conventional wisdom is that “we have to look forward, not backward” especially when behind us lies one of the most egregious crimes in history—a government deliberately deceiving its own people and the rest of the world in order to start a war that would result in the loss of tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of lives, the vast majority of them innocent Iraqis. At least all those kids died for a good cause—to make our military contractors richer.

I’m hearing almost no outrage about this, but I don’t have the energy to express it to the extent it warrants. My voice won’t make a lick of difference anyway, as my past two years of blogging have made clear to me.

In the past I might have been able to fully research and write out a lengthy post about all of these topics but now I just don’t feel like it. Presumably I’m just in a temporary slump right now and I’ll get back in the swing of things after a little while, but for now I’d rather devote most of my mental energy to learning Japanese—a much more practical use of my time seeing as how I’m moving to Japan in August. [Incidentally, learning Japanese is surprisingly fun. I only began last weekend and I can already read hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ) at about a 1^st-grade level, and I’ve got about fifty of the most useful words and phrases firmly memorized.]

So for the handful of you who actually do appreciate my political posts, I just wanted to explain my relative absence from the blogosphere at this point in time. As with this post, I still intend to write something every now and then but not with as much frequency as before.

Meanwhile, Revolution Earth remains open for business and virtually devoid of participation (for which I mostly blame my own lack of motivation). I sincerely thank everyone who has been posting there, and anyone still interested in joining that little operation is always welcome. It doesn’t cost too much to maintain, so it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

Until next time, sayounara (さようなら).

After watching President Obama’s State of the Union Address, I didn’t think there was anything about it particularly worth writing about, and that any opinions I had would be expressed by other bloggers and commentators a million times over. But after a few days of reading and hearing others’ commentary it seems I do have something to say that nobody else is really saying.

Obviously there was much praise directed at Obama for how centrist and bipartisan the speech was, a perception greatly augmented by the fact that Republicans and Democrats had a mixed seating arrangement so it wasn’t as easy to tell as in previous years which policies were supported only by one party or the other (which in my opinion also made it much less interesting). And the speech-writer himself did a great job of lumping liberal ideas together with conservative ideas, often in the same sentence (as the mention of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was followed immediately by a call to college campuses to open their doors again to ROTC recruiters). One thing almost everyone can agree on is that Obama laid out a vision for America that transcends the partisan divide.

Obama’s essential idea was this: the most important battle of our time is not that of Republicans vs. Democrats or conservatives vs. liberals, but rather America vs. the rest of the world.

America, the president basically said, is losing its edge. Foreign countries—China in particular—are catching up with us rapidly and unless we come together and find solutions that can push us ahead again, we are in danger of falling behind. We should think of this as a “Sputnik moment” in which Americans of all political stripes join forces against the real enemy: foreign countries.

“What’s wrong with that?” many might say. It seems a perfectly acceptable tactic—the best way to unite two foes is by invoking a bigger foe that both have in common. Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, we would all like for America to remain top-dog on the world stage, wouldn’t we? Heaven forbid we become some kind of second-rate world power like those countries in…ugh…Europe. We all know how miserable those Europeans are.

I live in Europe and every day I hear people lamenting their non-superpower status. “I can barely make myself get up in the morning,” they say. “What’s the point of living if your country isn’t the most powerful nation in the world?” Sure, they work shorter hours, take longer vacations, enjoy guaranteed affordable health care and the comfort of knowing that losing their job won’t mean financial ruin, but none of that matters when their country can’t kick every other country’s ass economically and militarily. Yes, their existence is pretty dismal.

But in all seriousness, there are far more important things than being Numero Uno. There are far more important divisions than those of nation-states. Yes, conservatives and liberals share more common ground than we think, but so too do average Americans have more in common with average citizens of other nations than most of us think.

It seemed to me that the president was drawing a line across a battlefield with both Democrats and Republicans on one side and other nations on the other. In my mind, this is not where the line should be drawn at all. America is perfectly capable of out-competing the rest of the world without the middle class reaping any of the benefits from our nation’s success, which is the way things are going now. As the president said, we still have the world’s largest and strongest economy. We also have incredibly high rates of unemployment and poverty. American-based corporations are kicking ass on the world-stage (usually by hiring workers from other countries) but that doesn’t translate to more prosperity for the people.

In my mind, the most important line on the battlefield is between the haves and the have-nots in every country in the world. As a member of the middle-class, my interests are far more closely aligned with a German factory worker or Chinese schoolteacher than with the CEO of General Motors or the president of Wal-Mart. Everywhere it’s the top 2% vs. the bottom 98%, and everywhere that top 2% are cooperating to keep the other 98% down. Most corporations we think of as “American” are actually multi-national corporations, and they’ll cooperate with any foreign business leaders they can to increase the bottom line regardless of the effect on the overall prosperity of average Americans.

It’s the same old scene from the oft-referenced film Network in which the chairman of the network explains to his top news anchor how the world really works:

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels…We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.

In a way, the mixed seating arrangement at this year’s State of the Union was the most honest representation of our government we’ve ever actually seen. The Democrats and Republicans in our government are not enemies—they are two different parts of the same system. While one party may be more overtly pro-corporate than the other, both parties essentially work to advance the interests of multi-national corporations ahead of the interests of average citizens, be they Chinese, Russian, German or American.

I have to give the president credit for bringing people together. In the wake of the tragedy in Arizona I think it’s just what the country needed. I think the speech he gave in Tucson was highly appropriate and I was glad to see the partisan rancor toned down a bit in recent weeks.

But what good is coming together if we’re just going to be marched out to fight the wrong kind of battle? Are we just going to wave our miniature American flags and cheer on the success of our most successful institutions while ignoring the plight of the unsuccessful? Are we going to be the inverse-Europeans, working longer hours, taking shorter vacations, unable to pay our medical bills and being forced out on the street if we lose our jobs, yet unfazed by any of this because we can still cheer “we’re number one!”?

I’d like to see this question asked in a poll: “Which would you prefer: 1- America’s standing in the world goes down but the quality of life for the bottom 98% of Americans goes up, or 2- America remains the world’s most powerful nation but the quality of life for the bottom 98% of Americans goes down?”

Of course this is a false dichotomy—both our corporations and our average citizens can prosper, but not if we set ourselves apart from the rest of the world. Corporations would have to sacrifice some of their profits in order to share their wealth with the general population (most of whom do the nitty-gritty work which allows them to become successful in the first place), and if they did that the corporations in other countries unrestrained by social conscience would pull ahead.

Global cooperation is the only way forward if we’re to start bridging the gap between the enormously wealthy and everyone else. The common good, rather than the unrestrained pursuit of profit, must be the guiding principle for all businesses all over the world. That is the vision I wish a president would lay out, but I’m not holding my breath. “America vs. the world” is a much easier vision to get people behind, and it’s much better for the corporate bottom line.

[If you share my vision of global cooperation among the underprivileged citizens of the world, I hope you’ll consider joining Revolution Earth.]

I was going to write about Obama’s state of the union address today, but the speech was so bland, boring, and unremarkable that there’s really nothing to say about it, so instead I’ll just write up a quick entry explaining where my political blogging stands as of now and where I expect it will remain for the year.

I recently put myself through the arduous task of archiving all of my political posts from 2010, during which I spent several months dutifully composing at least one entry a day and sometimes several. It was a little experiment to see if more content would generate more traffic, and while the average number of hits per day did rise steadily it didn’t result in more comments which was the whole point. And now, the recent addition of a meta menu to the blog which allows people to register has generated several new registrations a day, virtually all of which appear to be spam-bots that automatically register on any blog for which one can register. It seems that just as few actual people are reading this blog now than when I started it.

I stopped forcing myself to write an entry a day because it was tiresome, but now that I have a good reason to believe that most of those entries went unread by anyone anyway it now seems completely pointless. I would often write about something I didn’t really care about just to have something to write, and a good deal of the 2010 entries are complete garbage.

So let me now make official what has already been apparent for quite some time: I’m no longer writing an entry a day or with any kind of regular schedule. Instead, I’m only writing when I have a topic I feel is worth writing about and when I feel I have something worthwhile to say. I cross-post almost all of my entries to Open Salon anyway (where people actually read and comment on them) and it would be excessive to post there every day.

At any rate, this year in politics looks like it’s going to be just as boring and predictable as Obama’s speech. We’ll see the Republican House pass all kinds of nonsense legislation only to have it fail in the senate or be vetoed by the president, and Obama himself continue to triangulate in preparation for the 2012 re-election campaign by catering to the establishment even more than he did in his first two years. No significant legislation will be passed, no major change delivered. And because it’s virtually a mortal sin to so much as suggest a progressive primary challenge, it’s a safe bet that the country will remain on the same steadily declining course for the next 6 years minimum (assuming the next financial crisis doesn’t come along and hasten that decline).

Blogging will hardly make a lick of difference, as no one in the establishment pays any attention to the chatter in the blogosphere anyway. Corporate America is the Borg, and it has both political parties and all major media outlets fully assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Nevertheless, I will continue to occasionally offer my thoughts on certain issues in the slight hope that I can sway a few opinions here and there and provide arguments for my fellow progressives to use in their own political debates, mostly for the mental exercise and the satisfaction of contributing in whatever virtually insignificant way I can to the national conversation.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep trying to figure out a way to get Revolution Earth off the ground, starting with a “topic of the month” in February which I hope will generate some activity. The best way to recruit participants is to spend much more time reading other people’s blogs, making contact with those I find impressive, and inviting them to join. Stay tuned.

In conclusion, the state of this blog is not very strong but I’m satisfied with where things stand. May God bless you (all of my non-robotic readers), and may God bless the internet.

America, meet Barack Obama’s new chief of staff Bill Daley:

Who is Bill Daley? Well, let’s just say if you liked Rahm Emanuel, you’ll love Bill Daley. Not only does he have a background in Chicago politics (he’s the current mayor’s brother), but he’s also got ties to Wall Street as well, having served as the Midwest chairman of JPMorgan Chase. And just like Rahm, he’s bought into the widespread misperception that the country is actually significantly further to the right than it actually is.

We all know how Rahm Emanuel pushed the president to pass any kind of Wall Street reform he could get, regardless of how strong it was. And we know he had the same attitude regarding health care reform: make deals with pharmaceutical companies and private health insurers that will increase the bill’s chance of passing, no matter how much these concessions weaken it. If you were thinking that a new chief of staff would bring a different kind of advice to the president’s ear, think again.

Regarding health care reform, Bill Daley told the New York Times:

They miscalculated on health care. The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.

Apparently he thinks the watered-down health care reform legislation went too far. He believes that when the American people voted for Change, what they really wanted was for things to stay more or less the same.

There are plenty of people who still believe that this is a “center-right” country and that liberals and progressives are just a small minority. After all, the media repeatedly and relentlessly trumpets this Gallup poll showing that when asked to describe their political ideology, 40% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 35% as moderate, and only 20% as liberal. Never mind that this poll only asks people how they self-identify and doesn’t ask for their actual opinions on a single actual issue—because more people are comfortable calling themselves “conservative” than calling themselves “liberal” (I wonder if decades of right-wing talk-radio might have anything to do with that?) they consider it an irrefutable fact that most Americans are not liberal, and therefore that most Americans are opposed to things like government-run health insurance, strict Wall Street reform, and raising taxes on the rich. Most Americans, because they call themselves “conservative” must therefore believe that fixing the deficit is the most pressing issue of our time, and that this must be done through spending cuts and under no circumstances with increased taxes for the rich.

As a public service, let me help to bust this myth for you once and for all. When you’re arguing with conservatives who say that you should accept center-right policies from your Democratic president because most Americans don’t agree with you (or when you’re arguing with progressives who say that you should accept center-right policies from your Democratic president because most Americans don’t agree with us), you can tell them that they are simply mistaken.

When you go issue-by-issue, the majority of Americans support the more liberal position on almost every single question ranging from foreign policy to gay rights, as this superb study by Media Matters proves.

When it comes to Wall Street reform, an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in April 2010 indicated that 65% of Americans wanted reform to be tougher, not weaker.

When it comes to health care, poll after poll consistently showed widespread support for the public option (i.e. “government-run” health insurance), including this New York Times/CBS poll taken in June of 2009 in which a whopping 72 percent of respondents said they were in favor. If Bill Daley thinks most Americans believe the health care bill went too far, he is just plain wrong.

And another great poll just came out this week, and it’s one I hope did not go un-noticed by Bill Daley and the rest of the folks at the White House: A 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll asked people what the first step they would take to balance the budget would be. 4% said cut Medicare. 20% said cut defense spending. But an overwhelming 61% said they would raise taxes on the wealthy!

Center-right country indeed.

Incidentally, only 3% of respondents said they would balance the budget by cutting Social Security, but that appears to be the course of action our “representatives” in Washington are going to take. But even though nearly two-thirds of Americans would rather raise taxes on the rich, that won’t even be considered.

Since he took office, the president has been surrounded by political advisors telling him to move to the right, to compromise on the liberal agenda because liberals don’t really matter. They’ve been telling him that most of the country is to the right of the political center.

But this is simply not true. Washington is significantly to the right of the rest of America, which is significantly to the left of the political center. President Obama doesn’t seem to understand that. And sadly, his new chief of staff Bill Daley is not going to be the one to tell him.

Every year at my high school, there was a “career day” for seniors. We had the opportunity to choose to hear from a variety of speakers who had been invited to discuss their various careers as a way of helping us determine the course of our own lives. Of the many possibilities I’d been considering at the time, a career in law was one of them, so I signed up to hear the lawyer speak about what his life was like.

Despite my relatively conservative up-bringing, my parents and grandparents had instilled in me the values of human compassion and sharing what we have with the less fortunate, and most of my teachers reinforced these ideals throughout my life. Hearing this lawyer speak was like diving into a freezing cold ocean when you’ve only ever swum in heated pools—you may have had a basic understanding that water could be different than the way you’ve always known it but you’ve never actually confronted that reality until now.

The lawyer spoke to us perhaps more frankly than we’d ever been spoken to before, not only sharing the fact that a career in law meant excruciatingly tedious work and horrendously long hours, but sharing his philosophy that it was all worth it because, when all is said and done, money is the most important thing. “Life is a game,” he imparted to us, and “he who dies with the most toys wins.”

Even at the time I knew that I’d learned a valuable lesson by actually hearing someone express this view in complete sincerity, but I only gradually came to recognize the full significance of that experience as I looked back on it over the years. It was the first time I realized that the world is actually full of people like that—people who see life as a game in which the “winners” owe nothing to the “losers”—and that I just hadn’t known any of them. That all of the various groups and sorts of people I’d been thinking of as enemies weren’t actually on the opposite side of the most important “us vs. them” divide in the human race, but that it was this way of thinking that represented the true enemy.

In the world of online discourse (particularly among Americans), I’ve noticed that almost everyone seems to have drawn their own lines around who they see as part of their “team” and who they consider “the enemy.” I’d like to take a moment to look at some of these various ideas regarding who our real enemies are, and point out why I believe that people are misdirecting their anger when most of it ought to be reserved for that special kind of scoundrel I’ve alluded to above.

1- The foreign terrorists are the enemy. This is quite a common view in the “post-9/11” world, and at first glance it seems quite reasonable:

“I may have my differences with my fellow countrymen but I recognize that they are my fellow citizens after all. The real threat to our security comes from the outside, and we should all be willing to join together to fight the radical militants who would kill us indiscriminately to further their religious and political goals.”

While radical extremists certainly are an enemy, I don’t believe they can be considered the enemy. The people who commit acts of terrorism such as suicide bombings are usually the victims of some kind of oppression, whether real or perceived, and they honestly believe they are fighting for a good cause. The only effective way to defeat radical extremism is to gradually and painstakingly root out oppression worldwide and win people over with ideas. Simply declaring them Enemy #1 and attempting to kill them all is the most counter-productive approach possible, as the past decade has demonstrated. In doing so you only create more terrorists, thus providing our real enemies with more manufactured enemies with which to enrich themselves by fighting.

2- The political left is the enemy. Thanks largely to real enemies such as Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch, many conservative Americans do not see liberals and progressives as people with whom they have mere political disagreements, but as the greatest threat to their way of life.

“The terrorists may be out to get us, but the liberals are helping them. By insisting on giving these people their Civil Rights, they’re inviting them to attack us and get away with it, and by apologizing for our nation’s mistakes they’re weakening us in the global community. Not only that, but these progressives want to take all my hard-earned money and give it to lazy poor people who do nothing but mooch off the system. If they had their way, the Church would be abolished and we’d all be worshipping a communist dictator.”

Aside from the blatant misperception of what liberals really want, conservatives should recognize that they share more common ground with present-day liberals than they probably realize, and that political differences can often be reconciled with rational argument and compromise, provided everyone is interested in the common good.

3- The political right is the enemy. Too many people on my side of the political spectrum seem to think that conservatives like the people we see gathered at Tea Party protests are the real enemy, and most of our energy should be spent fighting them.

“These Tea Party people are as bad as the Taliban. If they had their way, women would have no rights at all and minorities would be perpetual second-class citizens. They’d impose their fundamentalist Christianity on all of us and institute laws and punishments based on Biblical Scripture. Given the chance, they’d remove every shred of the social safety net and leave everyone to fend for themselves.”

Naturally I agree that a lot of the sentiments I see expressed by conservatives do lead in these dangerous directions, but I believe that most are far more moderate and reasonable than that. Most conservatives that I know believe in equality of the sexes (even if they’d deprive women of certain reproductive rights) and aren’t overtly racist (even if they believe that minorities are given too much special treatment). They almost all agree that some social safety net is necessary, and with the right combination of rational discussion and compromise there is no reason to consider them any more of an enemy than those who practice different versions of the same religion.

4- The ideologues are the enemy. You have tension all along the spectrum from moderate to extreme on both sides of the political divide, but this is always more of a problem for the party in power. Today there are moderate conservatives who see Tea Party extremists as an enemy, but even more prevalent (at least in the online circles I frequent) are the progressives who view those who criticize President Obama as the biggest obstacle to progress.

“We have the most progressive president in generations, but there’s only so much we can expect him to accomplish. The criticism he gets from the right is clearly ridiculous, but those on the far left who constantly complain about his compromises are doing even more harm. Their impatience will result in losing what little power we have left, as if the president is to have any political leverage at all he needs our unwavering support.”

I will readily admit to being impatient with the president, but I object to being treated as Enemy #1 by my fellow progressives. As I’ve written many times before, the president needs a strong left flank not just to push him to move towards what I believe are the right policies, but to allow him to move there by shifting the political spectrum (see: Overton window) to the left. Without a strong voice of opposition to policies such as tax-cuts for the wealthy and indefinite detention, the president will take the path of least resistance by implementing or extending them. Conversely, without strong and constant advocacy (some call it “whining”) about things like repealing anti-gay policies or fighting climate change, the president will take the path of least resistance by ignoring these issues. The president may be a progressive deep in his heart of hearts, but the realities of governing have turned him into negotiator-in-chief, not fighting for one particular side but merely trying to balance the nation’s competing interests: those of the average people on the right and the left against those of their real enemies, who have most of the leverage.

5- The moderates are the enemy. The inverse of the above sentiment is one I’m more sympathetic to, but which I still think is a mistake. On the right, you have Tea Party conservatives in a rage over those who don’t conform to their rigid ideological purity tests, but on the left these days it has everything to do with the president:

“The people who follow the president like blind sheep are the real enemy. They enable him to move further and further to the right and to protect the interests of the giant financial institutions and the military industrial complex by telling the rest of us to shut up and keep quiet whenever he does something we find unacceptable. Instead of fighting for the principles we all believe in, they are willing to sacrifice those principles for the sake of political expediency, and we often find that half a loaf is as good as no loaf at all.”

Very few people follow the president like “blind sheep”. Most have good, substantive reasons to support him, and he needs those people to keep the impatient among us in check. While I have suggested that perhaps a weak Democratic president might allow more harmful policies to be implemented than a Republican (because the left would be unified against the latter), I am still receptive to the case that the current president has accomplished more than we give him credit for and shouldn’t be tossed under the proverbial bus just yet. That said, I find that Obama’s defenders all too often respond to legitimate, substantive criticism of the president with personal attacks against his critics, likening us to whining children. While we keep our cross-hairs on those in power, they point their guns at us.

6- The government is the enemy. We’re getting to some overlap now, as many who see liberals as the enemy often conflate them with the government. But their sentiment is basically this:

“The government is made up of a bunch of corrupt, greedy, power-hungry individuals who want nothing more than to control every aspect of our lives. With enough size, the government will take over everything and determine who gets what. Success as we know it will become impossible because everything will be owned by the State and distributed as it sees fit, regardless of who has actually earned it.”

To be [extremely] fair, this would be a legitimate worry if circumstances really were as these people are led to believe by Limbaugh & Co. In the past, governments have taken too much power and imposed a brutally unfair system on the people in the name of equality. But that is not the direction things are heading in now, and it’s a mistake to try and push back against a tide that’s already receding rapidly. Ideally, the government is “of the people, by the people, for the people” and if the right kinds of changes are made to the current system, there’s no reason it can’t work for us as it was intended to.

7- Corporations are the enemy. Now we arrive at what I consider the appropriate frame. While I would hesitate to say that corporations themselves (or even most of the people who run them) are Enemy #1, I would place that designation squarely on the corporate structure and make my case thusly:

“The corporation is a soulless, amoral institution designed and required by law to earn as much money for its shareholders as possible without regard to any other considerations. As such it not only destroys the environment but finds ways to funnel wealth from every other sphere of society into its clutches. Left unchecked, corporations will continue to grow and accumulate more of the world’s wealth through mergers and acquisitions until only a small handful of companies hold every last shred of political power in the world, which they will use for no other purpose than to maintain that power even if it means global poverty and irreversible harm to the planet.”

Those who see government as the enemy are only scratching the surface: government is the enemy only insofar as it is currently a tool of the corporation, which is really the dominant ruling institution of our time and the one that constitutes the greatest threat to our collective future.

The corporation is not a person but if it were, it would be like the lawyer I met at career day all those years ago. The corporation doesn’t care how many hours it works or if it ever sees its family—it is unconcerned with human relationships of any kind. The corporation does what it does because by its very design, money is the most important thing. The corporation makes only the decisions that will maximize its own gains and minimize its own losses, determining each move according to a strict formula derived through Game theory. To the corporation, it is all a game, and “he who dies with the most toys wins.”

Until the rest of us acknowledge this reality and stop devoting so much of our energy to secondary fights like the battles between or within political parties and the overblown threat of foreign terrorists, the real enemy will continue to wage war on us without our noticing, until one day the damage is irreversible and all of us—from conservatives to liberals to politicians to religious extremists—will realize that we’ve all lost.

I will try to make this as brief as possible because I want to increase the likelihood that people will read it. If you agree with my assessment, I hope you’ll spread this around the internet far and wide, because this is a conversation that needs to happen NOW if it happens at all. Running a progressive candidate against Barack Obama will require a year of fund-raising, and the Iowa caucus is a year away.

I never thought I’d advocate challenging Obama in the 2012 election, but I also never thought that after two years of a Democratic president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, things would still be this bad.

Foreign policy-wise, the troops are still in Iraq and our presence in Afghanistan has escalated. The prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base are still open. The torturers have not been punished nor even investigated, and the president has now claimed the power to execute American citizens suspected of terrorism without due process of law.

Domestically, our government is still illegally spying on its citizens. Private health insurance companies still have no competition to prevent them from profiting by letting people die. Wall Street is continuing the practices that crashed the economy and unless more measures are taken it’s only a matter of time before the second crash comes. The climate change issue has gone completely unaddressed and Big Oil and Coal can continue to rake in record profits. And now, the national debt and deficit will continue to sky-rocket for a minimum of two years as the completely un-necessary and un-stimulative tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans are extended. Presumably, this decrease in revenue will be balanced by decreases in spending, and it looks like Social Security is first on the chopping block.

“But wait,” you might say, “didn’t he sign a measure strengthening registration and reporting requirements for lobbyists?” Yes, you can easily rattle off a long list of small-ball accomplishments that we could never have expected from a Republican president, but most of these things can be done or un-done with the stroke of a pen. When it comes to the fights that really count, the things that go to the heart of the broken system, this president has consistently maintained the status quo.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Obama’s advisors started talking about how the tax-cut deal he struck with Republicans would actually be good for the country. Fox News commentators are actually praising Obama for finally “admitting” that tax-cuts for the rich create jobs, and because Obama has now made Bush’s economic policy his own, he has no choice but to defend it. It’s absurd to think he’ll fight to let them expire in two years if he wasn’t willing to do that when he still had wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Democratic president will now be pushing for Republican policies and defending them with Republican talking points. Presumably, we’re going to start hearing him agree with his deficit commission that cuts need to be made to Social Security.

At this point, it has to be acknowledged that unless we issue a primary challenge to Obama, we will essentially have two Republican candidates in 2012.

The objection to this strategy is clear: A primary challenge is likely to fail and it will only weaken Obama and hurt his chances to win the general election. And wouldn’t a Republican president be worse?

Until last week I would have agreed with you. But then I asked myself this question, and I hope you’ll ask yourselves the same:

Which is worse for America? A Republican president who tries to implement Republican policies which progressives and the majority of Americans can rally against to stop those policies from going through? Or a Democratic president who acts as though he has no choice but to implement Republican policies, in which case the progressive movement is fractured and there is not enough unified opposition to prevent them from going through?

Ideally, a primary challenge would result in a true progressive in the White House who will finally draw lines in the sand and be willing to take sides with the American people and against the upper class. But if not, it’s beginning to look like a second Obama term would actually be worse for America than a Republican.

It usually doesn’t pain me to admit when I’m wrong. Intellectual honesty is something I always strive for, and it demands that I concede things from time to time. But when I find that I was on the wrong side of a fence for a long period of time, making multiple arguments to support a position that I later discover was based on false beliefs, it can be especially difficult to own up to it.

But after this past week’s debacle over Obama’s cave-in to Republicans on extending the tax-cuts for the wealthy, I now have no choice but to admit what I’ve refused to acknowledge for the last two years: I backed the wrong horse in the 2008 primary. Hillary Clinton was not perfect, but I think she would have given us slightly more change, as she was ten times the fighter Obama will ever be.

Don’t get me wrong—I still think Obama deserved the nomination. The Obama campaign was a grassroots movement inspired by a message of hope; energized young people and re-energized old people coming together and fighting to achieve things long-considered impossible to achieve. However empty the candidate’s rhetoric ultimately turned out to be, it can’t be denied that those words reached people, inspired them, got them to believe that we could get the country back on the right track.

Conversely, the Clinton campaign was the epitome of the Washington establishment machine. It was run by Mark Penn, one of the biggest hacks in the business. Today Penn is the CEO of Burston-Marsteller, a PR firm that represents such fine upstanding clients as Philip-Morris and Blackwater. He just wrote a piece for the Huffington Post telling Democrats to stop engaging in “class-warfare” and get behind the Obama tax-cut deal. In it, he actually urges Obama to spend the next two years focusing on: “issues like the pursuit of deadbeat dads, protecting kids from internet stalking, personal privacy, and zero tolerance of drugs in schools.” Translation: don’t rock the boat. Don’t try to change anything. Just protect your image at all costs. That was the strategy behind the Clinton campaign and we had every reason to believe that this small-minded attitude towards governing would have carried over into her presidency.

So I don’t regret supporting Obama in 2008. I’m glad that the more high-minded, progressive candidate who promised to do big things beat the more small-minded, conservative candidate who promised little more than competence due to experience. Had she won the nomination the message from the voters would have been: “let’s just play it safe and not try to accomplish too much.” Instead we sent the right message: “let’s give real change a try”.

But it turned out that the candidate who inspired that message didn’t actually embrace it himself. Perhaps he did try at the very beginning (though the appointments of Geithner and Summers to top economic positions before he even took office would suggest otherwise) but it wasn’t long before he started behaving exactly as you’d expect him to if Mark Penn were advising him.

How different would a Hillary Clinton presidency have been? In terms of substance, I doubt there would be much difference at all. The health care legislation that Obama finally managed to pass was almost exactly what Hillary Clinton had been proposing on the campaign trail: a system based on an insurance exchange and mandates requiring coverage. The only thing that truly separated Obama’s plan from Clinton’s already corporate-friendly plan was the public option, but Obama tossed that out the window near the very beginning, along with his opposition to mandates.

So we would have got the same basic plan, but I’ll bet we would have got it much sooner. Hillary Clinton does not shy away from conflict—she proved that quite effectively by staying in the race long after the cause appeared hopeless—and she would not have sat idly by and enabled Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats to obstruct and delay the way Obama did. Obama barely raised a finger in protest to the underhanded tactics of the opposition, which stretched the fight out far longer than it needed to and had the extremely unfortunate side effect of giving the Tea Party the fuel it needed to fully entrench itself in American politics.

Would there be a Tea Party at all if Hillary were president? I suspect it would exist in some form, but I doubt it would be as strong as it is now. Though to be fair, a lot of the energy on the far right is a direct consequence of the color of the president’s skin and has nothing to do with his governing style. Hillary would have been accused of being a radical socialist terrorist-sympathizer too (Fox News would attach those labels to any Democratic president regardless of reality) but there probably wouldn’t be questions regarding her citizenship or religion.

A Hillary Clinton presidency would have looked about the same from the right as an Obama presidency, but things would look a lot different from the left. Simply by virtue of the magnitude of what Obama promised, he was bound to let his supporters down to some degree. That doesn’t mean I think no candidate should ever make lofty promises (provided they intend to at least try to follow through) but it’s obvious that expectations of Clinton would not have been as high. We knew she was relatively conservative from the very beginning, so the progressive base wouldn’t have felt so betrayed and demoralized from all of the compromises and concessions she would have made to Wall Street, Big Energy, and so on.

But would Hillary Clinton have agreed to extend the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans in exchange for virtually nothing without putting up the slightest hint of a fight? I deeply, seriously doubt that. Even those who make a living spewing out Washington conventional wisdom (with the exception of the hackiest hacks like Mark Penn and Mark Halperin) are aghast at the political ineptitude of Obama’s tax-cut deal. Here was a chance to fight the Republicans on an issue with overwhelming public support on your side—make the Republicans deprive struggling citizens of their unemployment checks during the winter in order to make the rich richer—and Obama just ignored it. He agreed to continue the economically disastrous tax-cuts and add $700 billion to the deficit just so he could continue to play nice with John Boehner.

Yes, his stated reason was that he didn’t want to see any “hostages” get hurt. You have to let the Republicans have their way if they threaten to financially harm the American people, right? Well then what’s to stop them from threatening to financially harm the American people over and over and over again?

I am clearly not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but I definitely think that she would have understood that and she would have fought them on this issue. Even if it was just a purely cynical political calculation to boost her popularity and hurt the other party, she would have made that move and the side-effect would have been a slight improvement of the country’s fiscal policy. Because Barack Obama is so horrendously averse to conflict, because he will do whatever it takes to avoid a fight at all costs and take the path of least resistance at every possible juncture, he bends over backwards to the Republicans whenever they so much as raise their voices, and directs all of his frustrations back at his own progressive supporters…more and more of whom are now becoming former supporters.

If I could go back in time and change the result of the 2008 primary, I still wouldn’t. I think the message of the Obama campaign transcends Obama the person and it was important to show the world that it was a message the American people supported wholeheartedly. But for all practical purposes, Hillary Clinton would have made a better president.

To Barack Obama I would say this (and I’m sure he reads what every single disenchanted liberal blogger has to say about him): we have remained true to the message of your campaign. You have not. You expect us to be loyal to you personally, but that increasingly requires disloyalty to the ideals you campaigned on. We supported you because you represented the Hope that things could Change, but you no longer represent those things and you should therefore not be surprised that we no longer support you.

If we’d wanted nothing but watered-down corporate-friendly legislation we would have given the nomination to Hillary Clinton. We picked you because you led us to believe you could do more, and instead you wound up doing less.

I’d rather see a real progressive run a primary challenge against you in 2012, but if Hillary Clinton shocked the world by deciding to run against you again, this time I would vote for her.

I’m not sure why, but even though everyone expected it, even though I called it a month ago, I’m still extremely angry about Obama’s decision to cave in to the Republicans on the Bush tax-cut issue. Perhaps I’d been holding out some hope until the very end. Perhaps it’s because no matter how angry you anticipate you’ll be when somebody does something you find despicable, you don’t fully feel the anger until they’ve actually done it.

I won’t spend too much time going into all of the reasons why extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans is a bad idea in terms of policy—I think most people already understand that trickle-down economics is bunk and that the more money we borrow from China the worse-off our country is—but it’s a far worse decision in terms of politics. In this case, the politics are more important than the policy because this sets the tone for the next two years and will thus have a significant impact on every policy to be addressed during that time.

First of all, it’s important to know what public opinion is on this issue. In a recent CBS news poll only 26% of responders said they believed the tax-cuts should continue for everyone. 53% said they should only continue for income under $250,000 a year, and 14% said they should all expire. If you add up the last two numbers, that’s 67% of Americans who want the tax-cuts for the wealthy to expire to just 26% who want them to continue. Public opinion is overwhelmingly against extending the tax-cuts for the rich (even just among Republicans, the numbers are 52% opposed to 46% in favor).

There are those who say that making a deal with Republicans was a political necessity. Obama did what he had to do. It was the responsible thing. The Republicans would have blocked unemployment benefits for people badly needing them unless Obama agreed to a two-year extension of the Bush tax-cuts. Obama used an appropriate metaphor, painting the Republicans as terrorists holding the middle class and the unemployed hostage. He said that while you shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, sometimes it’s necessary to prevent the hostages from being harmed.

But that’s only half the analogy. If you cave in to the terrorists’ demands they may release the hostages this time, but it only encourages more hostage taking in the future. The Republicans know exactly how to manipulate Obama. They’ve been doing it for the last two years and will continue to do it for the next two years unless Obama finally stands up to them. Sometimes you have to let the hostages get hurt to prevent harm to future hostages. Show the terrorists that taking hostages is not a winning strategy, and they’ll have to find a different one.

So what could Obama have done? It’s very simple, and it would have been a far better strategy than caving in:

Call the Republicans’ bluff. Make them filibuster. Make them hold up every single piece of legislation until the 111th Congress expires, and at the beginning of next year all taxes would go up across the board, for the rich and the middle class alike. Make it clear that it is the Republican Party that is responsible for taxes going up, that their obstruction is the reason the unemployed have stopped receiving benefits, that the START treaty hasn’t been ratified, and so on. Make it as clear as possible to the American people (most of whom are already on your side) that the Number One priority of the Republican Party is getting tax cuts for their rich friends, and that they’re willing to let the middle class, the unemployed, and national security suffer just to help out the people who are least in need of help.

At the very beginning of the next legislative session, introduce new tax-cut legislation completely separate from the Bush plan. Cut taxes for the bottom 98% of Americans if you must, but refuse to include any cuts for the top 2%. Include an extension of unemployment benefits along with compensation for whatever the unemployed had been deprived of thanks to Republican obstruction.

Dare the Republicans to filibuster this. They probably will at first. But how long do you think they’d be able to hold out? Every single night, even the least informed Americans will turn on the TV and hear about how their taxes have gone up and the unemployed aren’t getting the money they need to heat their homes because Republicans insist that the rich aren’t rich enough. Do you think the majority of Americans will blame the president for not caving in? Or will they blame the Republican leaders whose shrill cries of “but…but…but the job-creators!” will grow increasingly hollow as this drags on.

The media may even decide to look deeper into the issue—to research the impact of personal income-tax reduction for the wealthiest Americans and actually inform their viewers that it doesn’t create jobs! (Honestly, they’ll still probably be too afraid of accusations of bias that they won’t do it. If the facts come down solely on one side of a political argument, the media’s tendency is not to report those facts.)

But if the Republicans are pressed, they will fold. They’ll see which way the political winds are blowing, they’ll notice their approval ratings plummeting, they’ll hear from their staffers just how many angry calls they’re getting every day from people demanding to know why they can’t feed their children because the rich need more money, and they will end the filibuster and let the bill come to a vote.

Republicans are cowardly politicians just like the Democrats, and if someone stands up to them they will cave in. But Obama has yet to stand up to them.

If he actually did fight back and won this political victory, it would set a great the tone for the next two years. Republicans would know that they can no longer get away with blocking everything, and Democrats would know that if they’re willing to fight they can win.

Furthermore, Obama’s disaffected base would be completely re-energized. Hope would be resurrected. Change would be back on the table. Perhaps now would be the time to bring the public option back up for debate or to impose stricter regulations on Wall Street.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives may uniformly oppose these things, but if the people can clearly see which party is trying to get things done and which party wants to spend all of its time investigating the White House while the economy suffers, they’ll reward the party that’s fighting and punish the one that’s obstructing. Obama will get a second term and fresh congressional majorities in 2012 and he can become the Change president we all hoped he would be.

Oh, but it’s too late. The deal is done. Obama has decided to let the Bush tax-cuts continue, thus empowering the Republicans to get whatever they want for the next two years just by threatening to filibuster.

To make matters worse, the “Bush tax-cuts” will henceforth be known as the “Obama/Bush tax-cuts” and Obama will have no defense against the Republicans howling about the deficit in the next election. The tax-cuts will add an extra $700 billion to the deficit and the Republicans will put the responsibility squarely on Obama’s shoulders in spite of their hand in it.

Obama won’t be able to defend himself, because the responsibility was squarely on his shoulders, and he shirked it. He negotiated with the terrorists, compromised himself and the country, and when the terrorists come back and blame him for the harm to the country that they made him do, he’ll have no excuse. It’s over. The terrorists win.