Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, long has been one of our favorites here at Legal Schnauzer. She's smart, articulate, unapologetically progressive, and she's easy on the eyes.
My eternal flame for Katrina is OK on the home front because Mrs. Schnauzer likes her, too. "Whatever's the opposite of a man crush, that's what I've got on Katrina," the missus says.
Our collective Katrina crush has grown stronger since our gal recently had the guts to write the truth about Barack Obama--that he's on his way to a failed presidency. In our view, the vanden Heuvel piece is the most insightful analysis so far of the Obama administration:
The president has suggested unconvincingly that he'd prefer to be a successful one-term president than a two-term president who didn't get anything done. But there are other alternatives. If the president continues on his current course, we're looking at a failed one-term presidency that the nation cannot afford.
What should be Obama's No. 1 priority? He must help our nation overcome what vanden Heuvel correctly calls 30 years worth of "calamitous conservative misrule." Obama, sadly, simply does not seem to get it:
Forget about electoral mandates or campaign promises. This president has a historic mandate. Just as Abraham Lincoln had to lead the nation from slavery and Franklin Roosevelt from the Depression, this president must lead the nation from the calamitous failures of three decades of conservative dominance. This requires beginning to reverse the perverse tax policies that have contributed to gilded-age inequality and starved the government of resources needed for vital investments. This demands correcting destabilizing global imbalances, laying a new foundation for reviving American manufacturing and shackling financial speculation. It means ensuring the United States leads rather than lags in the green industrial revolution. And it requires unwinding the self-destructive military adventures abroad. The president must strengthen America's basic social contract in a global economy, not weaken it.
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