From Bad to Worse

This has been a bad couple of weeks for Democrats. If we add the election in November, things have been going downhill for a few months now, with the exception of the now moribund healthcare reform bill (which would have been a huge, baby’s got back, but). Obama has looked into the abyss and instead of finding himself, appears to be moving even further to the center (www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2010/01/25/obama_panicking?source=newsletter). I sometimes wonder if DC even knows that the financial crisis continues for a lot of Americans. Obama seems like he is going to shift to Republican strategies (with minor Democratic modifications): tax cuts, focus on the deficit and caps on spending. This seems like a really bad time to shrink the size of government, besides essentially putting up the white flag to the barrage of far right criticism (and contradicting what Obama said just a few days ago in Ohio). One wonders in the end if Obama has the resolve to stick to his guns? If we can say nothing else good about Bush, and I’m hard pressed to do so, at least he stubbornly adhered to his political philosophy. I cannot remember the last Democrat to do this. It might very well have been Lyndon Johnson who tirelessly and successfully pushed through almost his entire Great Society initiative. I have no idea what Kerry really stood for, am as confused about Gore in 2000 as he seemed to be, see Clinton as a major sellout (forgetting even the liberal social program side of his triangulation strategy after a couple of years) and could add a long list of other reptilian cowards to the list. With all the DNA testing going on, maybe our only hope is to clone FDR. Anyone have the number for those South Korean scientists?