DO NOT ACCEPT NARRATIVES OF DEMOCRATIC WEAKNESS

Lets makes the left's* case against Obama in language that's about as neutral as possible:

Obama seems very intelligent, and is certainly able to recognize mistakes and learn. The fact that he doesn't change course after following strategies that are abject failures indicates that, for him, they are not abject failures. They are the outcomes he wanted. He wanted to stabilize the economic system while leaving a high level of unemployment because he values avoidance of inflation over full employment. He wanted the big banks saved and the present system to continue. Why? Because it delivers enormous amounts of money to people who work for Wall Street. When he gets out he wants some of that. If he remade Wall Street that possibility would have been gone.

On HCR, he wanted RomneyCare, because he wanted to bailout the insurance companies, defuse the movement for HCR by giving up the minimum while he retained the old system. On FinReg, he wanted a bill that wasn't going to be too tough on business. On the mortgage crisis, he was looking for measures that would protect the banks and do nothing for the people while providing some window dressing.

Obama is not a Democrat. he ought to resign and run as a Republican.

Exactly.**

Actually, I'd say that Obama is a Democrat. The difference between the two legacy parties is purely cultural: The Rs are out front that they want to kill the weak, and the Ds want the same thing, but they also still want to think that they're the good guys at heart. The Ds are like those nice, NPR-listening HR people in a corporation where the CEO, the CFO, the CTO, and all the other executives are monsters of greed and sadism. (That makes the Ds less feral, and less "effective" predators than the Rs, because the Ds are always having to momentarily interrupt the looting and pillaging to salve their consciences or wash their hands. But the bodies pile up in the end.)

Whenever we say Obama is weak, or the Ds are weak, we're simply setting ourselves up for another round of revolving heroes (remember Dean? "I want my party back?" What a shame). Because the answer to weakness is strength: A personal characteristic that degrades rapidly, in our celebrity-driven culture, into hero -- or, in some cases, heroine -- -worship, a mentality that's lethally destructive to accountability, as we have seen with the OFB and Obama.

The question is not "How can we get a strong party?"*** but "How can we enact good [, clean, fair] policy?" And the first answer to that is "Not through the legacy parties."

NOTE * Supposing there to be a "left" that is also a "third pole."

NOTE ** My scenario is "a government of national unity" to "deal with the current crisis," whatever that might turn out to be; certainly the next "shock." Brodergasmic!

NOTE *** Let alone "How can we get a strong leader?"; there are many answers to that, not all of them good.

NOTE This is from a comment thread from a post by lets at Big Orange. The commenter who responds to him is an idiot; maybe somebody who still has an account there can deal with the matter....