Acceptance of intolerable levels of unemployment while not advocating a massive federal jobs program (until lately which has little chance of passing and is strictly a campaign ploy)
A failed health care reform package (no public option) that has merely increased the influence and coffers of the private health care behemoths without lowering the basic cost of health care which was the primary reason behind the need for reform to begin with)
Placating and appeasing the Republicans at every turn and on most issues rather than appealing directly to the people
Retaining the Bush tax cuts for the rich
The utter failure in capitalizing on a filibuster proof Democrat Senate and a 40 plus seat House majority in 2009 that would have completely neutralized Republican obstructionism and no-nothingness.
But these are just some of the highlights (lowlights?) regarding Obama's presidency.
For alongside his failures stand the Neanderthal, anti government, anti tax, debt obsession ideas of the Republicans and their "tea party" brethren. Add to this mix the larger than life largesse of the corporate and special interests that essentially control the electoral process (a process made almost complete by SCOTUS ruling in "Citizens United") and we have a completely dysfunctional, incompetent and corrupted government incapable of exercising anything resembling representative democracy.
The coming 2012 useless exercise in presidential politics will present no real alternative to keeping the country from the decline and decimation of its middle class and halting the slide into a corporatized plutocracy of oligarchs, which goes to their benefit at the expense of the more than 300 million others. They own it and we're just the dutiful bystanders (until WE decide we aren't).
From this vantage point the signs of the people's willingness to rebel against and retake the country from the rule of the plutocrats and restore a true representative democracy of, by and for the people are at best faint and remote.
But I'll be there with those thousands of others on October 6 at "Freedom Plaza" in Washington, D.C. Many are vowing to stay in protest until"things change.
Maybe we can be the vanguard of the necessary rebellion in this country (as others are currently doing right now on Wall Street).
There is still hope. Just don't expect it to come from Barack Obama.
[i] "Small Donors Slow to Return to Obama Fold, Reluctance Underlines a Sense of Disillusion" by Nicholas Confessore, Kitty Bennett and Griff Palmer, "The New York Times, September 25, 2011.
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