Ms Walsh, don't worry about the betrayer in the White House. He will be sent back to Chicago in 2013, as was LBJ in 1969, but still a young man. Not only a young man, but a man with many chits on the financial, health insurance, "defense" industries, etc. Who knows, he might get a terrific job with Blackwater and be on many corporate boards. He will still be the cunning wordsmith and will have many invitations to speak at the gathering places of the wealthy, golf courses, country clubs. He may write a another book, "Dreams my Father Never Had".

It we the people for whom you should be expressing your concerns. We shall be paying the prices of the great quagmire and the Wall Street giveaways for years to come. We shall still be at war with a Nixon-clone as the new president, who will offer us "peace with honor" as the bodies secretly are brought in from Afghanistan (and Pakistan, too!)

Being President Obama will not seem so bad in comparing his future with ours.

The decline of the US as a superpower seems to be the only way to curb our militarism and imperialism. If we are lucky, we shall return to being a highly flawed, democratic republic. If not, we shall remain a nation ruled by its executive branch, a president who has usurped the powers of a lain-back Congress and who has undermined the liberties and rights guaranteed to us by our Constitution.

The bright side is we may no longer be able to invade other countries, attack them by air, starve them and kill millions of their peoples with impunity.

As I recall, and I think I "make no mistake", candidate Obama, specialist in military strategy and foreign policy, "made perfectly clear" his intention to shift our martial effort to Af-stan from Iraq. Joan Walsh probably voted for Obama - just a guess! She certainly would not have voted for a loser like Ralph Nader, would she?

Putting oneself forward above other priorities is a common behavior. The President has been described at some length as suffering from NPD (narcisstic personality disorder). The description seems well supported.

Some people, on the other hand, wrongly accuse Ralph Nader of narcissism, and instead of having supported him they reviled him. If, instead of voting for a winner, they had voted conscientiously, he would have garnered enough votes to give the progressive movement some muscle in the Congress.

Now, "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us".

About Ms Lewinsky, I have nothing to say. WJC is a charmer and is still a glamorous celebrity to many women.

WJC is one of a succession of bad presidents since FDR. The best way to punish that particular egomaniac is to pay no attention to him.

The Republicans are, for the most part, scum. Most Democrats are not much higher on the scale. Look at Baucus! Obama is wedded to the political establishment he said he would change. He is an incompetent at everything but crowd-pleasing. He has never accomplished anything as a law professor or as a legislator. Like most politicians, he is a narcissist. I would not waste a word to defend him even against unfair attacks, Mr Madden.

There's an elephant in the center of the salon! Your comments on the persistence of unemployment are probably correct, but you don't make the connection. The connection is to the spending on "defense". The debt does not have to be so bad as it is. There could be more funds available to help the economy. We are wasting a trillion dollars a year on "defense" in Iraq, Af-Pak, the "war on drugs" and nuclear weaponry. I know that if "defense" spending were cut, there would be more jobs lost. But these are jobs that don't produce anything. They are part of the problem. We need jobs that produce goods that people can use rather than armaments. If we ended our imperial projections of military power, we would be far less threatened by terrorists. Why do liberals like you, Mr Reich, wear blinders when it comes to relating our economic problems to our spending on imperialism?

You are right! A label, whether in the psycho handbook or scrawled on a wall, tells nothing. I used it because I recently heard an interpretation of Barack Obama's behavior based on the generally accepted description of psychopathic narcissists. It is available on YouTube under "Ali Sina". I know nothing about the person who calls himself Ali Sina, except what I saw on YouTube. I found his interpretation of Obama, done in 2008, helpful to my understanding of him. I had reached a similar conclusion but not in psychological terms. For me the dubious area was: is Obama simply lacking in "fortitude" (as Ralph Nader described him well over a year ago) or is there a deeper explanation? I found NPD a helpful description, because it explains the behavior and is not contradicted by a certain sort of boldness or daring that is somewhat inconsistent with a lack of fortitude. It took some guts to go from being an politician who lost a local election to state senator, US senator then POTUS. One may argue that is not the same as standing up to real power (corporations, the imperial elite), but the NPD explains better the boldness and at the same time the willingess to lie, to please and to ingratiate the establishment that offers recognition, acceptance and confirmation of Obama's personal delusions of grandeur.

Bill Clinton was, I think, a run of the mill narcissist. Joan Walsh may have correctly found in WJC real desires to do good, though they failed. In Obama, I don't think she can find sincerity at all, in spite of her all too generous sympathy. I would tell Ms Walsh to save her sympathies for the American people. Obama will go back to Chicago as LBJ went back to his ranch in Texas. One difference: LBJ suffered. Obama, protected by his narcissism, will just blame everyone else.