Yes, I know Obama's numerous missteps. Indeed, I have written critically about them. For instance, he kept on too many Bush holdovers, appointed too many Democratic neocon-lites, failed to conduct investigations into the Bush administration's war crimes, and escalated the war in Afghanistan (although he has begun to reverse that course).
I'm also aware of the deep flaws in the U.S. political process, especially since the right-wing-controlled Supreme Court opened the floodgates to secret corporate financing of the political process.
The national news media is also skewed heavily to the right, with CNN seeing nothing wrong in collaborating with Tea Party extremists, while NPR can't tolerate an anchor for an opera show participating in pro-democracy protests in Washington.
Nevertheless, as distorted as it is by money, the electoral system is how the United States apportions power and -- especially through the office of the presidency -- that power can do enormous harm through actions such as war or inaction on issues like global warming.
If nothing else, the American people have a responsibility to mitigate that damage by voting for the candidate likely to do the least damage. That may not sound inspiring but millions of innocent lives -- and conceivably the future of the planet -- can be lost if the wrong choice is made.
However, some on the American Left operate under what might be called "the vanity of perfectionism," the notion that what's most important is to have the "perfect" analysis even if its consequences are destructive to mankind.
Thus, flawed political leaders who compromise are judged as no better than extremely dangerous ones who would initiate wars like the bloody mess in Iraq -- or who would ignore long-term threats like global warming.
In Campaign 2000, Al Gore had shortcomings, but he was not the same as George W. Bush. To pretend otherwise was not only wrongheaded, it was reckless. It kept the race close enough for Bush to steal the White House.
The result was that many people died unnecessarily and the future of the planet was put at greater risk by Bush's hostility to warnings about global warming.
The JFK Model
Campaign 2012 and Obama's reelection bid will also have some historical parallels to the expected reelection race of John F. Kennedy in 1964.
Many Vietnam War scholars have argued that Kennedy, who made his own hawkish blunders with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and an early escalation in Vietnam, had learned his lessons and would have withdrawn U.S. troops from Vietnam if he'd won a second term.
Instead, Kennedy was gunned down by an assassin in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and his troop withdrawal never occurred. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, dispatched hundreds of thousands of more soldiers to Vietnam, making the human catastrophe in Indochina much worse.
Like Kennedy, Obama has faced a steep learning curve as president and has made his share of mistakes. But his completion of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and his timetable for phasing out a U.S. combat role in Afghanistan by 2014 suggest that he is following a JFK-like trajectory.
Except this time, what might reverse the course of history would be Obama's electoral defeat in 2012. Republican front-runners, including Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, have made clear that they would again pursue a muscular neocon agenda with higher military spending and insistence on U.S. global dominance.
Romney has turned to prominent neocons to write his foreign policy manifesto, entitled "An American Century," a tribute to the neocon Project for a New American Century, which provided the ideological framework for the invasion of Iraq.
So, the question now is whether the American Left will learn from these past experiences and recognize that -- as difficult and as imperfect as it was -- the movement to get the United States out of Iraq succeeded.
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