The man has just about been written off at this point. The leftist cadres who expected so much from Barack are now resigned to his government of the "center-Right," and as proof they cite his staffing with Clintonite pragmatists and Realpoliticians. Quod erat demonstrandum, as the educated wig-wearers intone down at the Inns of Court.
He's still okay in my book. I'm not a professional pundit and so feel no pressure to meet a daily news cycle in which the entire future must be predicted on a daily basis, even when on a day-to-day basis the entire future is predicted in ways entirely inconsistent with each other. I keep in mind that Barack has not been inaugurated yet and can only sit anxiously on the sidelines while Bush finishes up his sabotage rearguard actions. Bush, at this point, is a little like Saddam Hussein toward the end of the first Gulf War: firing his own oil wells with high explosives and opening the pipeline spigot to dump oil into the Red Sea. The Treasury Department is printing "money" at an insane rate and injecting cash as fast as humanly possible into every bank or investment house with a pulse. When the final "accounting" is done in late January, the fiscal situation in the USA will be unrecognizable in terms of historical standards. All of this has happened so fast, as the cascading defaults brought on by the imploding mortgage-backed security markets and credit default swaps created a fiscal Black Hole sucking the nation's wealth over the event horizon, that we haven't been able to clearly conceptualize it yet. Where are we now? What's really left? Do we have an auto industry? Any banks? Any investment houses? A housing market? Is there any actual "real" money left in the United States or is it all now pledged to government purchases of the entire private economy?
I think these are unanswered questions. That terribly worried look on the usually uncomprehending face of George W. Bush in the late summer of 2007 as he emerged from a meeting with Bernanke and Paulson - I remember writing about that, how strangely frantic the usually What-Me-Worry? Kid seemed. He'd been given The Word at that point. The Dow Jones was beginning its inexorable slide toward the "psychological resistance point" of zero. All the Wall Street investment banks were in deep trouble and most would fail. The entire body politic was infected with the "toxic" virus of over-leveraging and too-complicated-to-understand algorithmic investments, and they were all going bad. IT was everywhere and there was no way to isolate it. Bush was a shaken man, and bitter that he was not going to be able to escape the White House under the mythical cover of the "ownership society." Nope, George - the only one who owns anything anymore is you, and you own this one, lock, stock & barrel. It will be your enduring legacy - the Man Who Wrecked America.
So at least be realistic where Barack Obama is concerned. If the "progressives" were expecting Obama to install socialized medicine in the first six months, forget about that. What really is the "liberal agenda" everyone was expecting? What is the basis of the disappointment, and why is everyone so angry that Obama is choosing people with experience to deal with what may prove to be the greatest economic catastrophe in the history of the Republic?
For my part, I am simply relieved that Obama, without question, will at least restore basic guarantees of procedural due process to the legal system of the U.S.A. The outrage of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp will be stopped once and for all, and the true stories of the hundreds of men who have been imprisoned for years on end without a shred of evidence against them, their lives ruined, and all this outrage in service of the gung-ho fantasies of Bush & Cheney (the ultimate Chicken Hawks) as Anti-Terrorist Heroes - will emerge into full public view. Bush & Cheney set in motion so much malicious shit that it will take quite a while just to restore the government and the courts to basic working order. And from there, if there are time and money enough, Barack Obama can embark on "progressive" issues.
Bear in mind, all ye 52+% of the American electorate who put Barack in office, that the first task is to undo the massive damage caused by the 49% minority who put Bush within cheating distance of the Presidency (and Pope Scalia's ordination) in 2000, and by the 51% of the Befuddled Masses who doubled down on this error in 2004. That is an awful lot of crap to clean up. It may not even be possible. Bush not only wrecked the machinery of government, he squandered the wherewithal to repair the mechanisms. None of that is Barack Obama's fault. Give the brother, you know, a frigging break.
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