David Plouffe has a new book...
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Someone one day will have to tell us the story of how the Obama campaign went from -
"We made sure that everyone we hired internalized our core message and defaulted to those touch points when making decisions. For our break-the-rules strategy to work, we all had to remain faithful to its principles all the time."
- to surrounding the President with people like Geithner and Summers and allowing the special privileged interests to: gut the Energy bill,
prevent financial and banking industry re-regulation,
prevent / postpone prosecution of war profiteers and torturers,
keep us in Iraq and Afghanistan,
renew the Patriot Act essentially intact,
keep military commissions,
perpetuate suspension of Habeus Corpus and
turn the Health Care Reform Act into
the Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical Industry Mandatory Assured Profits Act.
What's happened to the core message, David Plouffe? Will your next book title be: "The Audacity of Vested Interests: The Inside Story and Lessons of the Betrayal of Barack Obama's Historic Victory" or "They'll Never Vote Again - How We Lost the Support of the Greatest Grassroots Movement in U.S. History"?
Perhaps even the best efforts of all of us are not going to be enough to combat the momentum of the tide of greed, incompetence and depravity foisted on us by the neocons even if we had the time to address the problems they created one at a time. Their disasters are unfortunately happening concurrently - are continuing to play out all at once.
The timing was awful for us to have had a two-term anti-science warmonger president. Climate change waits for no man. Now we have to play major league catch-up.
There may still be time for Obama to make a difference in the general outcome of our follies as a nation, but the longer we delay, the greater the cost.
We needed Obama to not only live up to the campaign rhetoric but to exceed it.
Real health care reform - single payer Medicare for All is what we needed. Even if something passes, what we'll get will be far too little and too late for those who needed real reform now - the 44,000 dying per year right now.
Real banking reform will be too late for the millions losing their homes right now because renegotiated mortgage terms could not be accomplished.
Real energy independence will be too late for the thousands of dead and injured soldiers involved in Middle East resource wars.
I can't be too hard on Obama personally because I really like the guy. I wish him well.
Global climate change by itself will make all the political waffling a mute point in 20 years anyway. It will be interesting to see which calamity gets to us first - does the first major damage - and how the effects of the other disasters in progress get altered in response. I'm sure someone at Rand or the Naval War College has been playing out various simulation scenarios in follow-up to the report on the effects of climate change on our future national security interests. Perhaps they should share some of the results with the executive branch? I wonder if they extended the model to include the underclasses in the security assessment?