Barack Obama, formerly the Rorschach Man upon whom so many projected so much hope, is by now an historical memory, but a vestige survives in core Democratic constituencies where a disposition to excuse almost anything he does or doesn't do persists. This is why Obama's astonishing post-election promises to be more, not less, "bipartisan," to "compromise" (surrender) more, and to heed public opinion better -- in other words, to ignore the concerns of his supporters even more thoroughly than before, the better to placate right-leaning "independents" -- have raised so little consternation. To cite another example now in the news, it is also at least part of the reason why there has been so little willingness to condemn his abject eagerness to toss more goodies Israel's way in the (vain) hope that its government will stop bullying not just the Palestinian Authority (that goes without saying) but the United States as well -- for a whopping ninety days.
To be sure, with both Democrats and Republicans peddling incoherent babble about deficit reduction (while keeping Bush's tax cuts for the rich and the Bush-Obama wars going), with Tea Partiers yapping at "mainstream" Republican heels, and with a Democratic Party still encumbered by Blue Dogs (fortunately, not so many as before) and still, as in the Clinton days, in "triangulation" mode, excuses unknown two years ago abound. Then too, there are the perennial excuses, most of which revolve around Wall Street and America's many complexes, not just the military-industrial one. Corporate profiteers with their campaign "contributions" and their hordes of lobbyists provide even more grist for those who would absolve Obama for disappointing almost everyone who voted for him. In short, there is no shortage of excuses. There is even the excuse of the Israel lobby for those whose faith in Obama's fundamental decency might otherwise be shaken by his readiness to let Bibi Netanyahu have his way.
But all of these excuses combined do not explain how a man of Obama's political skills and intelligence could conclude that, from now on, he'd better be even more spineless than before, and the sooner the better.
That Israel/Palestine is in the news now is uncanny inasmuch as it was Netanyahu who first realized that our Commander-in-Chief is all talk and that he has feet of sand. From the first days of the new administration, the government of Israel and the settler movement have not looked back. It took Republicans in Congress just a bit longer to realize how much they could benefit from sheer obstinacy. By now, only those who remain determined to cut Obama slack come what may haven't gotten the message. As the White House ramps up its undermining of the "better than Bush" argument, expect that even they will soon see the light. (Already on privacy and transparency issues and on Afghanistan, it is far from obvious that Obama actually is better than Bush.)
With Rahm Emanuel now Chicago's problem, it is harder than it used to be to blame everything on "f...ing retard" advisors, though Obama still has some, and they continue to give him bad advice. But the lessons Obama says he has drawn from November 2 are so profoundly mistaken that one has to conclude that there is more going on.
There is, to the best of my knowledge, no independent evidence supporting the idea that Obama craves abuse, though that would account for a great deal. However, were we to accept that explanation, we would have to conclude that his fellow Democrats, almost without exception, suffer from a similar malady. They may indeed, but I suspect that there is a better explanation for their craven antics: namely, that Obama and his co-thinkers in the House and Senate are only doing what they wanted to do all along but couldn't in the aftermath of the 2008 election, and that Tea Partiers and their mainstream Republican colleagues have become their excuse, their unwitting enablers.
Obama is not and never was the Great Progressive Hope. The idea in circulation only two years ago as Team Obama took shape, that he was such a consummate politician that he could draw on the expertise of "a team of rivals" -- not one of whom should give any progressive any cause for hope -- and still launch a twenty-first century New Deal was always ludicrous. But it did once seem that at least Obama's heart was in the right place and that he'd do the best he could, given that anything resembling a "profile in courage" would be out of the question for a Democrat in Bill Clinton's mold, which is all Obama ever was.
However now it is looking more and more like his heart is somewhere else -- that what Larry Summers and Hillary Clinton and General Petraeus want, maybe even what AIPAC wants, is what Obama and mainstream Democrats want too. How ironic that yesterday's Rorschach Man should turn out to be a soul mate of the pillars of America's declining empire. But, if a clinical explanation doesn't pass muster, this conclusion is difficult to resist. So is its corollary: that if anything worthwhile is to be salvaged from Obama's presidency, the time is past due for his supporters, still in denial, to face reality, and to respond accordingly.