For or against Obama, let's acknowledge a few things

[jpgray]

Obama is about as good as we can expect. Obama is not anywhere near as good as we need.

For the first part, take a look at the last ten years. We can't nominate progressives, and we can't even elect centrists consistently. Take a look at '10. We lost Feingold, we lost Grayson, we have put nutjobs in the House and in state offices all over the land. We need a talented sell-out centrist if we are to raise a ton of money and win. Obama is pretty good as far as that group goes. If Obama seems hapless in negotiation and liable to surrender without firing many shots on our behalf, he makes a pretty fair match for our congressional delegations of recent memory, speaking on the whole and barring a few exceptions.

For the second part, take health care alone. His plan did little to nothing to make health care affordable, but instead morphed into a subsidy and captive market for insurance companies. Campaign Obama excoriated Billy Tauzin and promised reimportation and negotiation for pharmaceuticals on behalf of Medicare. Well, in office he made a secret deal with Tauzin, capped pharma's exposure, and ruled out reimportation, negotiation, etc. Public option? "Any bill I sign..." you know the drill. Congress would've balked, yeah, but there was no battle of ideas on the subject whatsoever. We needed one. Nothing will explode the deficit like health care costs--social security is nothing to worry about compared to them.

So can we not pretend that we can elect a progressive in '12? Can we also not pretend Obama has been the person we've been waiting for?