After the Future

The Stupak Amendment

I'm not sure about the technicalities, and this issue does not concern me enough to say more than the few things I'm going to say here today. But as I understand it, Stupak will prevent abortions from being covered by the Public Option plan, assuming one is passed, and there's a fear that private insurance companies will not cover abortions if they are part of the exchange. So now we have outrage from the cultural left, and It's time to dust off the coathanger cliches and talk about the injustice and classicism of preventing poor people from getting the abortions so many of them want. 

What is astonishing to me is that stripping out Stupak in the mind of these cultural-left warriors is as important for them as retaining the public option. As if this problem of poor people not being covered for abortions is on the same level of importance as getting a bill that will cover 99% of the other procedures both men and women need. I know, their threats not to vote for the final bill with Stupak in it is a bargaining tactic, and I know that in the grinding legislative process that is to come, there will be changes to get us back to the so-called status quo.  So it won't matter that much by the time this bill comes to the final vote. This post is not about the actual legislation, but about the cultural left's attitudes toward any restrictions on abortion.

I am not bothered that they have the pro-choice opinions that they have, but about how freaked out they get when any restrictions are even suggested. It's dismaying that it is so inconceivable to them that there are a lot of Democrats who lean left on issues of economy and power distribution who find it difficult to be Democrats precisely because of the Democratic base's knee-jerk reactions any time there is any attempt to constrain abortion. There really is no middle ground for the cultural left when it comes to this issue, and it has to come to grip with the fact that lots of people like me see them as fanatical and unreasonable about abortion rights as we see the cultural right as fanatical and unreasonable about gun rights.

When Joe Lieberman says it's a matter of conscience for him to filibuster against the public option, we know it's nonsense and deserves nothing but our contempt.  When Bob Casey or Bart Stupak (C-Street connection loses Stupak credibility) say their positions on abortion are a matter of conscience, it's not at all the same thing.  Nobody has bought their vote, and disagree with them and argue with them, but accord to them and other Democrats like them the respect that they deserve. It's important that Dems with anti-abortion views not be tarred with the same brush as the crazy right; it's possible, really, that their positons are principled and sane, even if you can't agree with them.

But whatever one's positions on abortion or gay marriage, it has to be clear to people of good sense that the Owners are delighted whenever we all get sidetracked on these culture war issues, because they distract us from focusing on the deep structural injustices that the Owners don't want anybody to mess with.  As long as the cultural left and right continue this food fight, the deeper problems of power and wealth aggregation are pushed to the periphery, and that suits the Owners just fine.

I'm not trying to diminish the importance for the respective parties that these sexual politics issues play, but if anything is going to get done in the deeper structural areas, both sides have to give in a little so they can find the common ground that will allow them to work together to fight the real enemy who benefits most from these continued culture wars.

You Got a Better Explanation?

Warning: I woke up pessimistic this morning. From Hullabaloo:

. . . One of the most salient indictments of the Bush-Cheney regime was that they were stupid enough to fall for the biggest sucker bet in history, a pointless land war in the Middle East. A sane person might wonder how, with the benefit of 500 years of repetitive history to guide us, and the fall of the ancient empires to boot, even they could have been such idiots. But, as Orwell reminds us in "1984", the very purpose of war has changed, with the sole object now being to keep the elites in power perpetually:

"The primary aim of modern warfare...is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living...The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence in the long run too intelligent."

Will the President have the brains and guts to steer us away from this course of self-destruction? Even if he does - and I become lass sanguine about that every day - it's hard to believe the Owners will let him. And yet with their aversion to reform, their short-sighted greed, their celebration of their own ignorance, they are going to end up being failed parasites; because once they kill the host - we, the people - they'll end up on history's trash heap too. Reader Cleon at Hullabaloo

And of course it doesn't matter how much pointless, endless wars add to the deficit; we need to be fiscally responsible only when it benefits ordinary Americans. It's becoming clearer that the "Owners" (I like that as a stand-in word for the biggest players in the Defense and Financial sectors) let Obama become president despite his opposition to the Iraq invasion because he did an about-face on FISA and embraced the war in Afghanistan. For the Owners, one protracted war without any clear objectives or end in sight is as good as another.

So rejoice, the Dems, despite an overwhelming House majority just barely passed healthcare in the same week they gutted Oxley-Sarbanes, and yet the rabid right, with a lot of airhead media support, gets taken seriously when it depicts the Dems, these creatures mostly owned by the Owners, as far-left socialists. It's facetious.  And this battle for sensible healthcare reform: It's like a small bone the owners begrudingly are willing to let us have, but they are going to make us tug and grapple, like a dog playing a game, to pry it out of their hands--good sport--but it's sport that  better not hurt any of the really big owners--the Senate's will make sure of that. All the insiders, including Obama, understand this is the real world in Washington.

It's becoming clearer to me that bin Laden and others like him who want to destroy America understand how things work in this country better than most Americans do.  They understand that the Owners care not a whit for the long term so long as their bank accounts are fat and getting fatter.  The Owners are like monkeys whose hand gets stuck in the jar because it won't let go of the banana. Iraq and Afghanistan are the jar. No way the owners are letting go of that banana, and this refusal to be sane will--already has--hurt us more than the attack on the twin towers ever did. They are going to bleed us to death there.

Probably not much Obama can do about it, because the only way we get out is by Obama cutting off too many hands that are in that jar, and he knows he would be beat to death by their bloody stumps if he did it.  The Owners tolerate Dems so long as they are well behaved, but we saw what happened after Carter and Clinton. That's what we should expect after Obama unless things change dramatically before then.

Gay Marriage vs. Civil Unions (Updated)

Maine got all the attention, but It's interesting to me that Washington State voters supported a bill popularly known as the "Everything but Marriage Act" that gives gay couples all the civil rights of marriage without calling it marriage. Maybe there's a lesson in that. Maybe gay activists should let conservatives have the word 'marriage' if they want their legitimate civil rights. I think that the problem lies in that gays want more than that, though; they want cultural legitimacy, and that's not the state's to give.  Cultural legitimacy will come in time, but it can't be legislated. And I'd argue that it's a tactical mistake for gays to insist on marriage rather than civil rights from the state.

One of my basic arguments in this blog is that for us all to get along we have to separate out cultural issues from political issues as best we can. Most of my focus has been on criticizing the project of the religious right and cultural conservatives to insert Christian symbols and religiosity into the political sphere. I think the insistence by the cultural left on the use of the word 'marriage' in the effort to obtain for gay couples their civil rights is similar to the mistake that the cultural right makes. I think as a tactical matter the gay community would be far more successful in getting the substance of the civil rights they seek if it would separate out the cultural from the political, and in this case the cultural is mostly a matter of language and symbolism.

Quick Election Take

I'm pleasantly surprised by Owens taking the NY 23. The undecideds decided it, and their doing so supports the idea that there is a sane middle in the American electorate, and the ones in upstate NY, even though they lean conservative, were not going to be manipulated by the Palins, Becks, and Armeys.

It's more significant that the Virginia race was won by a Republican who distanced himself from the Palin wing of his party than that a Dem lost.

I hope the message that finger-in-the-wind "moderates" take from this is that for now, at least, the teabaggers are mostly bark with hardly any bite.

Movement conservatives will not learn a thing from these failures; they'll continue to do what they do because they are irrationally driven and don't care about practical politics. But their future relevance depends on their usefulness for entrenched power, which will not foot the bill for a strategy that does not get results.  If entrenched power pulls away from movement conservatives, they pull away the funding and the organizational coordination that has made these crazies important players in the political sphere for decades now. Without it, movement conservatism falls back to the irrelevant fringe where it belongs.

This strategy has worked for so long now, observers like me have become resigned to its always always working, but maybe we're seeing the beginning of the end here for movement conservatism. The craziness of August and the emergence of Beck is the reductio ad absurdum of the fundamental irrational logic that drives movement conservatism since Reagan. Movement conservatives who repudiate Bush as havaing betrayed the Reagan legacy don't see it, of course, but Cheney/Bush, Beck/Palin follows from Reagan as nausea follows from eating bad meat. Maybe, just maybe, the country, even with its low-information voters, is beginning the realize that the future health of the country simply does not lie with that lot. 

This is probably too optimistic, but it's not impossible.  We'll see how it plays out.

NY 23: Signs of the Times

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. Frank Rich

Seriously, it appears that the teabaggers are gaining steam. And lest we think they are just a funny joke, it would probably pay to recall instances in history when radical, paranoid right wingers got legitimate political power. The joke can easily turn into a nightmare.Digby

I'm not sure who's right here, because I think it depends on whether the economy returns to normal.  I'm not sure it will, and if it doesn't, continued economic anxiety will pull more so-called independents or moderates into alignment with the teabagger mentality.

NY 23 doesn't matter. The midterms next year do. If the Dems get some kind of decent healthcare passed and people are feeling the benefits before next November, and if the economy continues to improve, the Dems should hold on to their seats and even gain some.  The challenge is independents, the people in the mushy middle who sway this way or that depending on the mood of the times, which is largely a media construct.

Movement conservatism isn't going away.  That it represents are a fairly small minority doesn't matter so much as the fact that they are motivated, well organized, well funded, and have a high-decibel media megaphone.  They will always have far more influence than their numbers warrant because of those factors.  And they will be ready to move in as soon as the Dems stumble, and sooner or later the Dems will stumble.  The midterms will be their first significant test, but they can wait. They know that they will be the only aternative when people can't bring themselves to vote for a Dem.

What worries me is that there really isn't a sane center that plays a significant role in shaping the political sphere in this country.  I think most Americans are decent and sensible, but those people are not in politics or the media. And because we are in this neither-here-nor-there time of cultural transition, I'm not sure we have the collective ballast not to capsize if a serious storm hits. We won't really know until we're tested. In the 1930s populist energies leaned left; now they are leaning right, and that should be worrying to anybody with a lick of sense.

Design Change

I've had enough complaints over the years about how hard to read the drop-out type was--I just like the idea of the word appearing out of the night, so to speak.  But when a glitch occurred with the "Kierkegaard on the Couch" post, I finally decided to just go more conventional blog readable.  So it's done.  Hope it helps.

Kierkegaard on the Couch

...the specific character of despair is this: it is precisely unaware of being despair.  --Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.” --Gordon Marino

I just caught this op ed by Gordon Marino in the NYT.  It's kind of shocking, actually, that something like this would appear there. It seems so out of place these days. His points regarding the distinction between depression and despair are very important. A parallel distinction between 'acedia' and depression is also very well developed in Kathleen Norris's Acedia and Me. I'm not going to get into what 'acedia' means here, but it is not the same as Kierkegaard's 'despair'.  They are similar, though, in this respect: they are not to be confused with clinical depression--they are conditions hazardous to one's spiritual health. In fact, as the quote above indicates, for Kierkegaard, someone in a state of despair--which is the condition of the loss of Self--could be very self-satisfied and think himself happy. Despair is not an emotional condition; it's a spiritual one.

Quote of the Day: Yglesias (Updated)

The Senate Republican caucus is organized, like the House caucuses of both parties, like a partisan political organization whose objective is to advance the shared policy objectives of the party. The Senate Democratic caucus, by contrast, is organized like a fun country club trying to recruit members. Join Team Democrat and Vote However You Want Without Consequence! But it's no way to get things done.  (Source, h/t Benen)

I don't know what Lieberman--or Bayh, Lincoln, Landrieu, Neslon--will do eventually, but I suspect they'll get in line when it comes to the cloture vote.  But the point Yglesias makes still stands--the senate Democrats' m.o. is farcical. 

UPDATE: Stating the obvious, Greenwald on the Maddow show tonight makes clear how both Bayh and Lieberman and their wives are shills for the insurance industry.  Do they really want the conflict of interest scrutiny that is going to come their way big time if they support the Republican filibuster?  I doubt it:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Fighting for Healthcare Update

For many years, it's been centrist and conservative-leaning senators who have been scoring legislative victories by digging in their heels, so this represented a quite dramatic turnabout. It is difficult to remember the last time that progressives won a legislative victory by laying down firm demands and sticking to them. In the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has found its feet, too, and is locked in a final battle with conservative Democrats over the shape of a public option.

At the end of last week, Sen.Olympia Snowe of Maine, the lone Republican that Democrats are still trying to woo, said that she couldn't support a bill that had a public option with an opt-out provision. Snowe preferred a public option that would be "triggered" into being by a failure by the insurance industry to meet certain benchmarks.

But Reid and the leadership faced this basic math: There is only one Snowe and there are 60 members of the Democratic caucus. If just a few Democrats abandoned the bill, it would fall short even with Snowe's support.

This battle for healthcare is one thing that gives me hope that the pessimism that animated my post yesterday about the power vacuum created by a supine congress and filled by executive power is unwarranted. If a cohort of principled progressives in congress win here, perhaps it will empower them to address the abuse of executive power problem. The imbalance in our system of checks and balances is by far the most important issue the republic faces going forward.  But if a victory in healthcare is the first step toward congress reasserting itself, I'm fine with it.

Obama Coverup

I just came from reading Greenwald's piece this morning about the NYT editorial taking Obama to task for covering up the Bush era war crimes and for embracing Bush abuses of power. The comments after the post voice a lot of impotent rage, and I sympathize. But while it's disturbing, it is only baffling to those of us who really don't understand how power in large institutions works. 

Power does many things, but one thing you can count on it to do is fill a vacuum, and that vacuum has been created by a largely supine, morally vacuous congress. We can only count on congress to stand up and be counted when it comes to condemning the sexual indiscretions of Democrats; matters relating to the rule of law, the integrity of the constitution, or checks and balances, not so much.

Obama and his people deserve the criticism they're getting about not relinquishing the executive power arrogated by Bush/Cheney.  I don't think that at this point we can cut them any more slack on that. But there is tremendous institutional resistance to give up power; If a balance is to be regained, executive power has to be taken back, and the ones to do it are Congress and the courts.

And we, the people, are supposedly the ones who control congress.  But the reality is that entrenched power does as it pleases until challenged by a force that is greater than it. And that power does not exist except in numbers, and we are either too apathetic, or if not apathetic, too divided and conquered to muster enough numbers to pose much of an electoral threat.

We are forced into a position in which we must rely on the benignity of entrenched power, and that, of course, is foolishness.  And so things will progress along this tack until things get so bad, probably when the Republicans take over again, that there will be some kind of push back, and that will be pretty ugly. Until then most people just won't care. They've other concerns closer to home, and that's just the way of it.

Futile Culture Wars

My response (with a few slight edits) to a Jame Poulos post at Postmodern Conservative, "Why the Culture Wars Won't Die."  My argument is that while he might be right that these wars won't die, like most wars they are futile waste of energy that serve the interests of people who are not on the front lines.  I'm quoting  commenter Matoko Chan in the opening epigraph:

There is no “Culture War”.

There is only cultural and demographic evolution.
No religio/demographic group can fight cultural evolution.

I'm with Matoko Chan. The anything-goes folks vs. the honor-the-ancestors-folks have been fighting a war that has little relevance to culture or to the future of culture. Culture happens. And cultures die or at least experience winter seasons, which perhaps will give way after a while to a springtime. The winter season of the 14th century gave way to the springtime of the 15th.

I'm with Barzun. The West is decadent. Decadence happens, and like winter it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a time that doesn't have much exterior spiritual energy anymore--the spirit has gone underground, so to speak, into the soul's interior. And since the whole movement of salvation history has been a movement from outer to inner, from given to chosen, from the law given on slabs of stone on Sinai to the law written in the heart after Pentecos, it's understandable that the outer trappings of Christian Civilization should gradually become emptied and less relevant for the living of the faith.

I'm with Nietzsche. He was just observing what had become inarguable. Not that God was dead, but that He wasn't to be found in cultural/civilizational forms out there. Sure the forms exist, but with a few exceptions these forms have as much relevancy to the spirit that once animated them as the New York St. Patrick's Day parade has to the spirit St. Patrick. They are dead forms animated by the undead energies of nostalgia, jingoism, and other vulgar passions. Conservatives simply don't want to face up to this truth, and keep fighting this battle for a zombie culture, and in doing so are looking for love in all the wrong places--out there in the mainstream culture. They are fighting for the preservation of cultural forms that were shaped by spiritual cultural energies that simply no longer exist.

Look. I'm a trinitarian Christian. I go to mass and I believe in the real presence. I see the mass as the central event, the time when we reenact Christ's living into our death so that we may in turn die into his Life. I look forward to the retrieval of a kind of sensibility that naturally understands the world sacramentally, numinously, and I believe that's in our future, but it's not how we commonly experience the world now. And that retrieval, if it happens, will not depend on the preservation of medieval forms or some dream of Christendom's return. All that matters is that the mass be celebrated, that men and women of conscience, whether believers or unbelievers, respond to the ubiquity of grace that they, we all, swim in, and culture will take care of itself.

Focus your energies where they might actually bear fruit. This culture war business is futile nonsense. Let Christians live deeply their Christianity and let them find ways to renew the face of the earth, and if they do it, not through some head trip bent on preserving the unpreservable, but in radical trust that God has a future for us, all shall be well.

See also "Faith, Hope, and Love in a Decadent Age."

The FOX Brouhaha

I'm just trying to understand the administration's calculation in using this attack tactic to deal with right-wing media. Clearly right wing media are never going away. Clearly, while they get a big media share of the news pie, they still only reach a relatively small number of people. And the number of people who identify with Republicans and with its obstructionist program promoted through its media megaphone is down around 20%. So why should the administration care? Why not just let these people talk to themselves, and let them continue along this path which leads to marginalization and irrelevancy to every one with an ounce of sanity and common sense?

The answer: it's a containment strategy. The administration is concerned to hear that after the ACORN incident, mainstream news organizations are chastising themselves for not taking more seriously the news that these right-wing media invent, and the last thing the administration wants is for right-wing nonsense to be taken seriously outside the right-wing media ghetto. That's what they want to nip in the bud before we get full throttle into the kind of thing Clinton had to deal with. The problem lies in how right wing nonsense was covered by the networks and other mainstream media to legitimate what was fundamentally illegitimate.  It's understandable that Obama's people would be looking for ways to prevent that from happening.

If the administration can make the case that FOX deserves to be marginalized, not because it criticizes the administration from a conservative point of view, but because it is not really independent insofar as it serves as the talking-points media arm of the Republican party, then they have a legitimate case to be made that FOX is different and deserves to be shut out until it changes its behavior. The equivalency with MSNBC or with the opinion journalism of Maddow and Olbermann is unfounded.  They represent a Liberal/progressive point of view, but their opinions are not Dem talking points, they are often critical of Democrats, and they simply bear no resemblance in their relationship to the Democrats that FOX news personalities bear toward the Republicans. And most important, while they make no effort to hide their biases, they don't make stuff up. There is no equivalency here, and it's fair for the administration to point that out.

The problem is not that nobody at FOX has no serious journalists--there are apparently a few who qualify--nor does the problem lie in that sometimes they criticize the administration from a conservative point of view.It isn't just opinion; it's abetting and colluding with Republican political strategists. The problem lies in how a problem how these strategists make things up, throw mud on the wall to see what sticks, spread disinformation and confusion, and seek to subvert any legitimate debate with fearmongering and jingoism. They fabricate and distort in the hopes of manufacturing controversy that the MSM will cover, no matter how baseless, because people are talking about it. Think Vince Foster, Whitewater, death panels, Obama is a racist, fascist communist, etc., etc.

The challenge for the administration is not to marginalize legitimate criticism but to quaranteen that kind of baseless fabrication. How do you do the one without the other?  It might not be possible, but I don't begrudge them for trying.

P.S.  See also this bit on Mickey Kaus's take. The point isn't that it's unbiased, but that it's not independent.

You Gotta Dance with Them that Bought You (Updated)

"Can I speak freely about the liberal whiners?" asks a well-connected Democratic strategist. "These are the same people who have never participated in, much less won, a campaign, who have no idea what it takes to maintain a majority and keep a speaker of our party, who want Obama to kowtow to the loony Left, and then they're going to be the ones who say, 'What happened?' in November 2010, when we lose the House and possibly the Senate and maybe a lot of governorships." (Source)

When I read comments like this, what I really hear is "Don't these people who care about the public interest understand that if we Dems are going to win in 2010 we have to do the will of entrenched corporate power?"  The "conserva" in conservadems has far more to do with being bought than it has to do with political principle or ideology. 

In this political environment "conservative", whether in reference to Republicans or Democrats, means you dance with them that bought you. It has nothing to do with conservative political principle except as a pretext used by these politicians to justify their having been bought. They're bought by the Defense Industry, the Pharmaceutical industry, the Insurance industry, and Wall Street. Who am I missing? Whatever--there's simply not a lot more you need to understand.

Fighting for Healthcare Update

I'm feeling pretty good about getting a decent bill. We've come a long way from where we were in August. The insurance industry and its shills on the hill have overreached and have no credibility, and a broad consensus has developed that the Public Option is the only way to keep down costs. There are no good reasons to be against it, if you're a Democrat, and voting against will bring the unwelcome negative publicity that the vote is controlled by the insurance industry. The only ones standing in front of a good bill are a few conservadems who are needed for a cloture vote when the Republicans filibuster.  These conservadems will be under enormous pressure to vote for cloture, because it would be historically unprecedented for a Democrat to vote in support of a Republican filibuster. You can be sure that if they don't vote for cloture it's because they care about their future with their corporate backers more than their standing in the party. (This idea of a silent filibuster is ridiculous and Reid should be pilloried if he allows it.)

I'm not as concerned about a strong public option bill coming out of the senate.  I think that Reid needs something that can get the sixty votes with or without Snowe, opt-in opt-out, trigger--whatever it takes--and then when the senate conferences with the house I think the bill that finally comes out will have  a strong public option that can get 51 votes in the senate. The first step is just get it past filibuster.*

I think the momentum has shifted, and now it's just a question of how robust the public option will be. It will be up to Pelosi, Weiner, others in the house to insure that one is in the final bill. It will be up to Obama to pressure the fence-sitters in the Senate to go along with it. I think it's going to happen. 

*Correction (10/24/09):  In making this statement I assumed incorrectly that the conference report could not be filibustered. It's unusual, but it can be.  The bill coming out of conference back to the senate needs 60 votes just as the one leaving it does. The main points stands, however.  No Dem will stand with the Republicans in a filibuster. Lieberman might, though.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Bacevich

If the Afghan war then becomes the consuming issue of Obama’s presidency - as Iraq became for his predecessor, as Vietnam did for Lyndon Johnson, and as Korea did for Harry Truman - the inevitable effect will be to compromise the prospects of reform more broadly.

At home and abroad, the president who advertised himself as an agent of change will instead have inadvertently erected barriers to change. As for the American people, they will be left to foot the bill.

This is a pivotal moment in US history. Americans owe it to themselves to be clear about what is at issue. That issue relates only tangentially relates to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the well-being of the Afghan people. The real question is whether “change’’ remains possible. (Source; h/t Greenwald)

I haven't been writing much about Iraq/Afghanistan because what is there new to say? It may seem simplistic; nevertheless, the only compelling reason to explain this commitment to futility is that it benefits certain very important and powerful interests. Your normal politician, who understand the steep price fighting them would require, would rather not pay it, and so finds a way to pursue projects that don't disturb them too much. If Wall Street owns Washington, it's a joint venture with the big players in the defense industry. Insurance and Big Pharma are important players, but not in the same class as defense and Big Finance.

There are other layers of reasons for these policies, but they are all secondary, pretexts, or ex post facto rationalizations, and none alone or in combination would be sufficient to motivate this futile policy, just as WMD, or deposing a dictator, or promoting democracy was never the central motivation for invading Iraq. These secondary layers have legitimacy only as supporting justifications for the central reason: it serves the power and profit interests of a few narrow but very powerful interests.

That's what America has become, and Obama and the Dems are either unwilling or unable to do anything to change it. So nothing changes until Americans use their power-in-numbers to push back against the power-in-wealth that currently dominates the system. But power-in-wealth knows how to prevent power-in-numbers by tried-and-true, divide-and-conquer tactics. The culture wars are its current tool, and liberals are as easily manipulated by this play as movement conservatives. 

Politics isn't that hard to understand. It operates according to very basic, very primitive greed and power rules. We're in our current predicament because the American people, smitten by the Reagan fantasy, ceded their power to a pack of wolves who, spouting religious, patriotic, and free-market cliches, have largely destroyed a sane, workable New Deal framework, and in doing so nicely set themselves up to rule the hen house for the last thirty years.

This regression was so easy to effect because people with money have enormous power to co-opt the system to benefit themselves and to fund clever propaganda to cover their rapine. The Republicans took the lead, but the Dems happily followed, so now anybody who speaks out sincerely and passionately for the public interest, or any policy that based in common sense or common decency, is considered either a rube or a far leftist.  

So I don't know that any of us could do better than Obama if we were in his position.  Presidents only look powerful when they do the will of entrenched power.  Resist, and you will be destroyed.