Great news, even if still indefinite:
Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and perennial third-party presidential candidate, announced last month that he would work to find a Democrat to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012.
Nader now says that a primary challenge is a near certainty.
“What [Obama] did this week is just going to energize that effort,” Nader promised in an interview with The Daily Caller. “I would guess that the chances of there being a challenge to Obama in the primary are almost 100 percent.”
The only question, he said, is the stature of that opponent and whether it will be either “an ex-senator or an ex-governor” or “an intellectual leader or an environmental leader.”
In approximately a week and a half there will be “another chapter of this effort,” Nader predicted.
Thu Aug 04, 2011 at 9:39 PM PT: Nader isn't looking to run, himself. He's looking for a Democratic challenger (or 6) to challenge Obama, not expecting them to beat Obama, but rather to confront Obama on the issues. From Ralph Nader: Pressure Obama with primary
Nader told POLITICO on Wednesday that he is working on bringing together about half a dozen presidential candidates who could “dramatically expand a robust discussion within the Democratic Party and among progressive voters across the country.” Each would focus on a specific issue where the far left says Obama hasn’t done enough, including the environment, labor and health care.
3:35 AM PT: Regarding Nader's "What [Obama] did this week is just going to energize that effort,” (emphasis mine): While not nailed down (i.e., I wouldn't call her story 100% reliable, since it relies on mostly anonymous insiders), if Jane Hamsher's forensic analysis is mostly true, then New Deal loving Democrats have cause to be furious. That's because not only was Obama looking to cut Social Security from the time he got into office, and not only did he have lots of options for dealing with the debt limit non-crisis, but (according to Hamsher's sources) Obama's concern about his polling numbers contributed to his caving, and getting no revenues, at all. (Compared to the $800 billion that he and Boehner had previously agreed on.)
From Debt Ceiling Post Mortem: Obama Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Whatever resolve the President had on Friday when he began his Twitter attack evidently collapsed on Saturday when his Gallup numbers went from bad to worse. On Friday his approval numbers hit a new low of 40% approve, 50% disapprove. But on Saturday they moved to 40% approve, 52% disapprove. At that point the White House panicked and tried to go back and salvage the Boehner deal (which was described by administration officials to Politico as the White House making “our last play” on Saturday morning). Sources say they decided to bite the bullet, accept a zero revenue deal and determined to spend the next year “making it up to liberals.”
I scratched my head and asked how a deal that the CBO concluded would increase unemployment and slow GDP growth over the course of the next year could possibly put the President in a better position for the next election. The response was that they were so worried about the direction of the poll numbers they believed they had to do this or none of that would matter, and would worry about that later.
Glenn Greenwald has written about numerous options that the President had to deal with the debt ceiling, including the 14th Amendment, here (linked to from The myth of Obama's "blunders" and "weakness" ). His drop in polling numbers is apparently what motivated him much more, though, than not maintaining Social Security, or trying to get more revenue from those who could afford it.
Oh, and on the subject of the 14th Amendment, Hamsher writes,
On the day of the vote, Democrats in the House were told by Joe Biden that if the bill did not pass, Obama would use the 14th Amendment. Despite protestations by Obama to the contrary, the White House apparently believed that the President did have the authority to invoke the 14th Amendment, they just thought it would be too politically toxic.