Would you feel better about Obama if we got health care this time?

My problem with the piece at the center of this thread is that it's a typical Lind hit piece, promoting his one-note answer to everything - Radical Centrism, which is a mantra of the think-tank he co-founded. I think Lind is a Mandarin - airy talk with no true alternatives.

I can understand your frustration with Obama not coming in like gangbusters, but in some ways he has, in his own steady way. In slightly more than 6 months of his term we might be getting positive response to climate change. That was almost unthinkable just 3 years ago. He's made some great choices (Hillary, Sotomayor, Surgeon General) and some lousy ones (economic team). But Lind paints with a very broad brush, and everything Obama does is wrong to him - for ideological reasons, not in reality. That's what I can't support about this article. It's an advertisement for Lind, not a fair critique.

You can't use New Dealers as a shining example of single-payer healthcare if NONE OF THOSE PEOPLE were able to provide it in the last 60 years. Single-payer is the right solution, but good lord - if we can barely wrest a public option from the jaws of Corporate America, how are we going to take the entire healthcare industry away from them? Lind would say Obama's not thinking boldly enough. But then Lind says everything Obama does is TOO bold or TOO this or that, which I find ingenuous. Lind says DON'T go to college? I mean, c'mon.

I screamed for Obama too, and I'm still hoping that he's got the long game in mind - providing as much substantive change as he can, one thing after another so the media doesn't swamp him, like 1993. I also think he wants to smooth some of the psychotic left-right divide of the last 30 years, which I firmly believe has to do with our collective sense of diminishing resources, and therefore, a fading country. That's just what happened as Rome began to fade as a power - extreme partisan rancor became the norm. (In light of birthers, etc., though, that goal may be impossible, OR they might marginalize themselves out of existence.)

However, if Obama can do a stealth run around conventional expectations, and jump-start green economy and technology, at the same time as dealing with climate change and beefing up our education system, as well as our PRIDE in leading the world in innovation again.........well I'd wait for that. And more importantly, I'd help, which I think is the absolute number one secret ingredient to any possible Obama success.

If we don't get health care, though, it means he ain't got it. But I think he does. I sympathize with your view, but I hope he'll get your backing again. We all need it.

What an irresponsible thing to say, and how insanely foolish, if your goal is to correct the mess we found ourselves in after 8 years of Bush.

Does anybody remember how dark it was in 2003? How few liberal sites there were to take solace in? How we had two elections dissembled under us? We elected a leader, now we want to dismantle him. It has nothing to do with "cult of personality", everything to do with our own lack of common purpose, and an understanding of our individual responsibility in making things right.

If Hillary or Edwards were president, I don't for a second think this article would say anything different, nor the scores of Obama-pickers. Elected-leader-bashing has become a spectator sport, nothing more, nothing less. It's the way we get our rocks off.

Lind says the same thing every article - a blanket criticism of THINGS AS THEY ARE, without a single suggestion of meaningful, useful alternatives. Not one. He's a fluff-intellectual pundit, who sees his job to complain about the types, uses and provenance of the deck chairs, while someone else is trying to maneuver around the iceberg. God forbid he, you or I had to do the damn job.

"I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat." Will Rogers