President Obama has nothing to lose

Sure, President Obama would like to be a two-term president.  Once a person decides he or she wants to be president at all, that's pretty much settled.  The problem is, he's gone to such lengths to govern from the middle, to avoid angering anyone (except his shrinking base of support), to appease the howling lunatics of the ideological right, that he can't really be a credible progressive.  He never was particularly hard over on progressive policies anyway.  He was never an advocate of universal health care.  That was John Edwards.  He was never an absolutist against the war(s).  That was Bill Richardson.  But great-googly-moogly he talked a good game!

But here's the thing: the red meat right is never going to love him.  If the moderate right (by which I mean a view of the world that would have made the John Birch Society blush only thirty years ago) prevails, they have Romney, they don't need Obama.  And against the likes of Perry or Bachman, any pragmatic realism is only seen as weakness. 

So the question is, does the majority of the American electorate want the government to sponsor even the meager social safety net we have now or not?   Do they want all government regulation, of child labor, worker safety, environmental protection to be eradicated, leaving us to catch up with China on a slave labor-based prosperity, or not?  Do they want people who make millions of dollars (and create no jobs, whatever Boehner calls them) to be allowed to pay no taxes or not?

If the answers are yes, then Obama has no chance anyway.  But if the answers are no, then he needs to seize whatever executive authority he has and govern against Congress.  He needs to give the American people a glimpse of what a useful government can provide in a time of difficulty.  It may be too late.  On the other hand, he has nothing to lose.

My representative doesn't represent me - 2

The other day I received this mailer from Rep. Doug Lamborn:

There are many things wrong with it but let me pick on a few.  First take a look at the graph, "A Choice of Two Futures".  The current level of debt is something like half what it was at what appears to be the end of WW2.  And here we are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, a little in Libya and then all the post WW2 strategic deployments (Korea, Germany, I don't know where all).  So right away, that doesn't seem like too much debt.
Then there's some exponential curve that purports to be our projected debt at "our current rate of spending".  It's ludicrous on the face of it.  There's nothing historical to support that function, in fact more like the opposite.  It's just more right-wing "fact by assertion".

Then there's Lamborn's letter where he refers to the "failed trillion dollar stimulus bill"  and how the "treasury pumped hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money into the struggling economy".  Absent from his analysis is any notion of the utter catastrophe that market capitalism left us with and how much worse shape we'd be in if those initiatives he so despises were not undertaken.  But enough of that.  The real outrage is on the 2nd page.

In what he trumpets as a "Common-sense Jobs Plan", Lamborn lists 4 broad aphorisms, talking points of the right for some time now, that have no self-evident connection to the creation of jobs at all.  The times of low unemployment in the United States historically have never been associated with any of these things.  In fact, the only empirical evidence there is suggests that the measures Lamborn endorses will actually lower both the standard of living in the US and the rate of employment.  It is, of course, axiomatic to the conservative movement that taxes are bad for the economy.  Well, axiomatic or not, the only evidence we have is that taxes are at best irrelevant and more likely constructive.

And his "note to seniors" (of which I am one)!  Absent entirely, although not unexpectedly, is any acknowledgement that just increasing revenues a little will actually constitute the "real reform" he supposedly wants.