I sum it up as follows: We wanted a leader and we ended up with an idealist. The thing that bothers me is that the Obama administration has become SO hung up on this idea that the legislation has to be bipartisan that he’ll let the Republicans tear it to shreds as long as he can say it was a bipartisan bill.

Well, it looks like the terrorists have won, as today, we hear this:

As to the fate of a government option plan to compete with private insurance, [Obama senior advisor David] Axelrod suggested the controversial concept is gone but not forgotten: "The spirit that led him to support a public option is still very much at play here and so you know he wants competition. He wants choice. "

So we pretty much know the public option, the only real chance that a non-single payer system really ever had in making costs come down without sacrificing care is dead. If it’s not, this is the greatest rope-a-dope ever, but I doubt this. I think what’s really happening is that our Idealist-in-Chief has decided that in order to craft his “bipartisan” legislation (that all the Republicans will vote against anyway, lest they anger St. Rush), he’s scrapping the real reform out of the bill, and the crap we’re left with will be marketed as a real win for the rest of us. Except that, as usual, the only winners here will be the insurance companies and the politicians whose pockets they line.

I guess I’m just a bit sad about this because I stupidly bought into the idea that Obama was going to be a different kind of president. Someone who was going to stand up and fight for things and really deliver the change he campaigned on. While there is still time for him to change all of this, it’s looking more and more like instead of an advocate of real change, we’ve gotten an idealist who has decided his legacy needs to be bringing “bipartisanship” back to Washington, even if it means sacrificing his ideals.

Is it any wonder the Republicans are laughing all of the way back to the ballot box? In January, it seemed like they were a party lost in the wilderness for years to come. Now they look like they could conceivably retake at least one house of Congress next year. Therefore, let’s face the facts: unless things change dramatically, we’re boned.

Will Democrats ever learn?

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Life in the United States, said the contributors, was colorless, standardized, tawdry, uncreative, repressive, and given to the worship of wealth and machinery. This comes from this great book that I’m reading … about the 1920s. The “contributors” in this quote refers to the so-called “lost generation” of authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, et. al. It’s interesting to look at things the way they are now and realize that we’re in a very similar cultural pattern. Similar, but nowhere near alike. The most interesting difference, of course, is that while the 20s were marked by this massive standardization of society, a business-is-religion idealism, and a conservative outlook, it still produced some of the most brilliant artistic minds in American history. Much of the vanguard of American literature came from this period. Jazz music and American cinema also came into their own. The 1920s was one of the most culturally exciting decades in history, even though America really was staid and bland and boring. The difference is that now things are not like that. It’s unfortunate, too. We have the cultural conservatives who are attempting to steamroll their culture onto our landscape, and the scary thing is that they’re succeeding wildly. Sure, we have the mindless drivel of the Fox network and such, but they’re winning. Everything in our culture is vapid, but there’s no new vanguard developing to counterbalance it. I highly doubt that people will come back to this decade many years in the future and find much of anything culturally illuminating. And why is this? Because the people who control our culture have turned it political. Now, anything that could be regarded as “high culture” tends to be considered elitist and liberal, and those are bad things in our modern culture. It’s a shame to see how culturally vapid our nation has become. Who knows if we can ever recover from it. But you know what they say, the more things change…

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