If we reject Obama as president because he hasn't been able to put the entire Congress under the imperious curse, thereby getting them, together with the entire healthcare and insurance industries and the fools at weasel news and other reichwing outlets to fall in perfect line and create a healthcare bill that, somehow, we will all magically find to be exactly what we wanted, we will only prove, left and right alike, what morons we really are.

If we, on the other hand, manage to let our nation fall prey to those projecting their own dysfunctional, knee-jerk ideology (left and right) and those protecting their own very substantial profit margins and incomes and let this healthcare reform be scuttled, we will have proved that we have become too stupid and stubborn for anyone to govern us. The results will be exactly what we deserve.

Wake up, folks (and Salon editors). If Obama fails it will not be his fault. It will be ours because we will each have allowed our own image of what perfect healthcare might be to be the enemy of EVERYTHING else.

The two perspectives you seem to be accusing the Democrats of expressing regarding the Town Hall Meetings

1) that there are conservative organizations orchestrating loud, obnoxious demonstrations at Town Hall meetings and

2) that the Town Halls which have been disrupted by such angry-acting demonstrators are actually in the minority and not indicative of where the broad majority of people stand

are not in conflict with each other. They are complimentary to each other.

Have you been reading Kristol, secretly listening to Rubaugh or watching weasel news so much that you're now practicing "gotcha" journalism? Your abilities at analysis are usually far better than this!

Whereas Republicans, including many on this comment section, have the authoritarian personality dysfunction and thus regard the way the Republicans allowed President Cheney... ah sorry "Bush" and his cronies to bully the congress to be admirable, enough of the Democrats in congress have at least a mild case of oppositional/defiant disorder that, had Obama tried, with the stimulus or with healthcare, to present the congress with a bill and tell them to "take it or leave it," they would have rejected it out of hand.

But sadly, we have become so used to the way the authoritarian dysfunction works, that we think it's "leadership." True leadership comes from the ability to collaborate with and influence others, not from the ability to command (bully) others (except in battle, where command is absolutely required and the entire system is set up to support it).

To hear some of my progressive friends whining that President Obama is not acting enough like the Bushco cabal, and that the Democrats in congress are not rolling over and playing dead the way the Republicans did for Bushco causes me great distress at our collective cluelessness.

If Obama had tried to take the dysfunctional approach of Bushco, he would have been a complete failure. He may yet be a failure and sadly, if he is, it will be because governing the American people and managing congress has become akin to herding cats in that each individual person and congressperson is thinking only of their own self interest.

Perhaps what he needs is a giant spray bottle full of water to provide us with some, immediately negative consequences for our selfish, self-satisfied, "I've got mine, screw you if you don't!" behavior, with Ayn Rand, posthumously, his first target.