Avedon at Sideshow links to an excellent post on Obama by Ian Welsh, and adds:Obama had the power to do many, many good things, and he refused every opportunity to do them. He refused to even attempt the most basic steps of negotiation with the opposition, asking not for a higher goal than what we really needed, but a lower goal as a pre-compromise, thus lowering the bar further still. He alleged (when he was trying to get elected) that he believed single-payer was the best way to go, but then he started babbling about the public option before he'd even started making a case for single-payer, having simply declared that passing single-payer wasn't politically feasible. (Oh, yeah? Start pounding it into the general public that everyone in America can get effectively free health care without raising taxes, and see how far Congress gets trying to resist it past the next election.) He even telegraphed to the press that he wasn't even really trying to get his so-called "compromise" of the public option, but instead was hoping the threat of the public option would frighten the insurance companies into slightly softening their viciously predatory and fraudulent practices - which it didn't. If he'd really wanted single-payer, he could of course have spent a lot of time explaining how real socialized medicine actually works in Britain and used it as the scare image of what "the left" was demanding, forcing the not-so-left to welcome single-payer as a longed-for compromise. And that has been his pattern with everything.And more.
I read through the comments on Welsh's posts, and it seems to me that the Obamabots, while present, are fewer in number and somewhat less vitriolic than they used to be. Maybe they have bigger fish to fry elsewhere, like showing their cojones by jeering at Glenn Beck in comments at alicublog, but maybe they're losing the faith just a bit. But where will they go? The wilderness is cold and scary, and Robert Gibbs will call them names, and they can't stand that. (It's okay for them to call other Democrats names, of course, to say nothing of The Terminader.)
