First, anyone who uses "Pelosis" as shorthand for "worst imaginable outcome, from my (libertarian?) perspective" is a sloppy thinker. If Nancy Pelosi is the most emblematic liberal we have, we're in trouble and have a deficit of role models on the center-left.

Recent events have shown that it's far easier to drum up really ugly, unthinking, fear-driven mass insanity in today's wired, socially fragmented America than it was in the more sedate world of 1929-41. Sure, there were Townsend, Coughlin, Smith, Huey P. Long, lynch mobs and wars between unions and strikebreaking thugs, but where race, labor issues, and economic strife could work up relatively isolated populations into angry, violent frenzies, today the same emotions (part of our national DNA just as surely as any more positive traits) can be switched on and used simultaneously from coast to coast with a crook of Roger Ailes' finger to block anything approaching rational discussion or civil debate.

The same rationale explains the disappointing Obama strategy on health care. To fix health care, we have to confront how poorly our current system actually does its job--how bad we look compared to much "lesser" countries when it comes to infant mortality, access to primary care, child healthcare, end of life care, etc. etc. etc. To confront these truths might just destroy some of the core illusions about our own superiority that keep America limping along.

Obama's cautious centrism in virtually every area probably stems from his awareness of just how volatile America is right now. We take a relatively civil society for granted (except in invisible places like the inner city), but how solid is the fabric of our society really? Just keeping our crappy financial system semi-functional may be the best outcome Obama could foresee, as much as any sane, compassionate person should wish to junk the entire thing and start over.

I don't like it, nor do I agree with it, but I think I understand the president's rationale for basically continuing the Bush/Bernanke doctrine with respect to the banks and financial sector.

The progressive left is the Democratic Party's religious right...a dark vision. And a hell of a legacy for Obama to leave behind him.

Obama was elected with the help of many of the same triangulating, field-conceding, New Democratic forces that elected Clinton. So to find him friendly with Big Pharma from the get go is not all that surprising. And here he is, trying to placate both the progressive base that elected him and the lobbies that helped fund him and staff his administration, becalmed in the middle of the same pond that Clinton was. The result is that he has promised everything to everyone, when it was long ago time for him to say,

Hell yes, a sane and sustainable health care system is going to cost money; we may need to raise taxes. Your kids and grandkids will thank us for it.

Hell yes, this will impact the private insurance industry--and it should; they're complicit in the current crisis. The bottom line for America is not the bottom line for the health insurance companies.

Hell yes, this will harm the bottom line of wealthiest doctors and big health care corporations that run most of the hospitals and HMOs--but it will make working conditions for the medical profession better, over time.

Hell yes, we are giving up any pretense of bipartisanship--the Republican party removed itself from honest debate, so to do otherwise would be an insult to the American electorate.

Can the president divorce himself from the Clinton-derived conventional wisdom at this late date? We'll see, and soon.

of attempting to craft a health care reform bill entirely in-house, without Congressional collaboration. Obama seems to be making the opposite mistake. It's a great idea, in principle; restore the balance of powers that has been in abeyance since '01 by working with Congress to write the health care plan, letting a thousand flowers (or half a dozen competing health care bills) bloom in the meantime.

But now it's time for Truman's The Buck Stops Here doctrine. Obama needs to pick and choose the features of the various competing bills he wants, and apply some good old fashioned executive arm twisting and log rolling to make sure that THE bill, when it is voted on, includes those features. He needs to use the bully pulpit, old fashioned patronage, whatever--but he cannot continue to pretend that Congress is an equal partner in this process. Congress is piranha bait at this point; what do YOU believe we need, Mr. President?

Ironically, many of Truman's first-term difficulties came from the fact that he truly wanted to collaborate with Congress in drafting legislation; he'd provide the principles he wanted to see embodied in a bill and expect Congress to write the actual bills. After 20 years of FDR's more ex cathedra style, this led to chaos until Truman learned to exert the right sort of leadership in his dealings with Congress. The results (the Marshall Plan, etc.) were nothing to sneeze at. The difference is that Obama has less than a year to learn the lessons that Truman had nearly four years to learn.

We'll find out which lobbying firm the good (ex-)senator will be representing in due course. Probably just a matter of moving from the dugout to the front office, as it were.

I say this just because another GOP sex scandal would be too mind-numbingly predictable to contemplate.