Who would have guessed that just seven months into Barack Obama’s historic Presidency, so many would be panicking and running for the exits. If that’s the kind of devotion we have in mind when we say we support Obama and his Change You Can Believe In, then I hate to think what the next three and a half years will bring.
Politics is the art of compromise and calculation, and if there’s one thing we know about our President, it’s that he’s a master at both. He didn’t survive the Jeremiah Wright fiasco by sticking to his guns and going down with a ship that was no longer able to take him anywhere. No, he realized in a clear-eyed and pragmatic fashion what needed to be done to fight another day, and he cut lose Wright like an infected hemorrhoid.
Any truly effective politician realizes when it’s time to cut lose people and policies that have become non-starters. Obama astutely realized this with Single Payer, and now he realizes it with the Public Option. He realizes that he is now governing ALL Americans, not just us here on Daily Kos. He realizes, like all great leaders realize, when the benefits of a policy or promise are outweighed by the liabilities. Public Option has become an albatross. Obama needs to pass something, anything, this fall on healthcare, and he realizes that isn’t ever going to happen with Public Option in the plan.
And this is exactly what any great leader would realize and would do. If we wanted a policy purist and real change, we would have pushed harder for Kucinich. But we all realized that purity of policy and effecting real change – especially at the expense of the corporate interests that are the real leaders of America – would have been political suicide. We realized we needed the next best thing: Barack Obama.
Now it’s time to support our choice. Obama has enough enemies with the Republicans; he doesn’t need us criticizing him too.