This is a pasta President, or perhaps a boneless chicken(hawk), no strength or spine to be found. All he can do is wallow in MIC sauce. I wish I could agree with Nader's allusion to the possibility of BO changing his modus (in)operandi and actually functioning, but I have no 'hope' of that happening.

Far from being the progressive savior that so many thought Obama would prove to be he has turned out to be a non-leader in the most powerful position on the planet at the very time when serious and deep systemic problems that have been ignored for years are crying out to be confronted. How were so many fooled by this smooth talker? I know I wasn't. I voted for Ralph Nader who would have proved to be the leader we needed at this crucial moment. But that moment and opportunity have passed and we are stuck with a lack of leadership for another three years as the Republicans gear up to scare the populace into backing their reactionary proposals. This is a tragedy of epic proportions coming as it does after the wasted and catastrophic eight Bush/Cheney years. It will be a huge miracle if after all this the republic somehow manages to correct itself before complete collapse ensues. Personally I don't believe that is going to happen because I see an exhausted and dispirited people here who have been manipulated and abused for such a long time that they may be incapable of awakening for the necessary struggle.

In the best anarchist traditions, democracy would not be about leadership. If Obama wants to be a referee instead of a player, fine. Put these issues up for a popular vote.

Ralph Nader was right all along.

And Obama and the Democrats are proof that the differences between the two parties are almost PURELY cosmetic.

Firstly, Obama has never been a progressive.

Secondly, in Obama's failed congressional election against Bobby Rush, he ran to the right against Rush, but lost badly.

Thirdly, Obama has always been surrounded by those close to the big money class.

Fourthly, Obama's presidential campaign was all hype and no substance.

Fifthly, Hillary Clinton did try to pin Obama down on specifics and he became sarcastic and almost punk-like in his responses.

Sixthly, Obama is very skillful at avoding specifics even though his choices to run his administration should be evident about what he does believe.

Nothing but nothing about Obama is a surprise---people need to go and do some research on his choices from Ezekiel Emanuel on Obama's Healthcare Advisory Board to his original choice of Tom Daschle as HHS.

There is nothing authentic about Obama. He is not dumb and knows exactly what he's doing and is very comfortable doing it.

You will not "change" Obama and waiting for him to change is futile and naive...

Run for the Senate, Ralph, you're needed desparately!

According to Mahatma Gandhi, the seven blunders are:

1. Wealth without work
2. Pleasure without conscience
3. Knowledge without character
4. Commerce without morality
5. Science without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without principle

Obama certainly exhibits #3 and #7, and promoting and/or maintaining #4. And #5 by maintaining and employing the military industrial complex to escalate the war.

I think it may be worse than Ralph Nader suspects. More than concessionary- perhaps he says what "needs" to be said at the moment- and then pursues policy that aligns with whatever powerful interests he is beholden to at the time. Loyalty does not seem to be one of his strong points (understatement).

During the Democratic primary it was fine to sound progressive in order to get the nomination. However one of the first indications of sacrificing principle to expediency is when he refused to accept public campaign financing. Given the domination of US politics by money this was hardly a principled move- but was forgiven because of the perceived odds against him. Little did we know...

After being elected he needed to appease Wall Street since he clearly recognized (or believed) that they had the power. In Afghanistan- other than alienating some of his base- he knows that the greatest political risk is to take action that might be perceived as inviting a terrorist attack. Cheney and his Republican cohorts helps remind him of this almost daily...

It goes on- whether it is our policy towards Israel, global warming, etc. principle is subordinated to appeasing the powerful interests that seem to predominate in order to appear not to be weak or ineffective. Ironically, the reverse takes place- he is perceived as weak by serving these very interests.

And if this analysis appears too cynical- his actions are nonetheless tantamount to this. Intentions can only be inferred from actions. And when there is such a disparity between words and actions, then actions do indeed speak much louder than words.

His polices are not so much tentative as inadequate and compromised. Because his tone can be noble- one always has hope that he will act on principle before expediency. We often hear that he inherited a mess- that he has only been in office a year. These things are true- but there are too many indicators- where even his rhetoric seems oddly compromised- for example his speech in Oslo or the phony display in Copenhagen.

I truly hope I am wrong....

Whatever "progressive" Obama had in him before he became Senator in 2005 got shed in all these years. People can keep parroting Obama's "make me do it" mantra and keep annoying others with all this "it's your responsibility not his" rubbish but leaders have special responsibilities and duties to follow for every citizen in this nation and he has a responsibility to keep the international political tensions down. That is not something we citizens have. I know some people can take Gandhi's "be the change you want" quote and twist it to shamelessly defend Obama and try to divert blame on the real culprits in Washington but the reality is we need real leadership or else most of our efforts are likely to go wasted. Yes, each of us can do our part but that does not relieve our leaders of their responsibilities. This is why it is important that we the people take a hard look at who we choose to lead. A bad leader is like a bad foundation. With bad leadership, you are put through more wasted efforts. Worse, this leadership gleefully trashes the working class's efforts just like the previous administration. It is bad enough when Obama disappoints people with his "change you can believe in" mantra and then returns to status quo when the game is over. Worse, even those of us out there pushing for that real change we can believe in such as small farmers and local single payer advocates are running into trouble with the feds and Barry is somehow ok with it. Some people may call me nuts to suggest that this president be impeached and convicted and sent to the gulag but I am tired of seeing valiant and worthwhile efforts to help struggling communities trashed by the rascals in Washington.

I will have to correct Nader on one thing though. Obama is "bold" but not where it counts. Ever since he became Senator in 2005, he has been shamlessly siding with the corporate and military elite and he shows no signs of reversing that. Obama is also shamelessly "bold" enough to trash valiant and worthwhile efforts in his desperation to maintain the status quo at its worst.

I think he is a Neocon shill put it place in the Democrat party by the poers that be, because they knew no GOP candidate could be elected after Junior bush

God, it would be great if this man was President.

Regarding the old saying about leading, following...
it's time for Obama to get to hell out of the way. That's a big part of the problem: he is an passive-aggressive obstructionist which just drains energy out of democracy like a vampire.

"His is a concessionary demeanor, an aversion to conflict"

No surprise, Ralph, because this is exactly what the boss ordered. The boss wanted an ongoing marketing campaign depicting two contestants, the Demoks/Repuks, behind which the people, the targets of the marketing campaign, are to rally behind, like in a ball game. Unlike a ball game, though, the one contestant appeals to the competitive side, and the other to the cooperative side. They temporarily adopt the other side's principles to get hired, but then return to classical conditioning of the base, like Pavlov training the dog. The boss hires certain types who perform appropriately.

Who's the boss?

Nader / McKinney 2012

Your article hits the nail on the head.
What astounds me as an outsider, now very aware of the US because it is a perceived threat these days to everyone's security, is that the voting public of the US have at least 2 excellent choices for leadership: Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich--both proven leaders with quantifiable results---yet, they keep electing obvious corporate patsies...? What gives in the 'land of the free'?
As a foreign target of US economic and military atrocities, I'd breathe a sigh of relief if the likes of Mr. Nader, Mr. Kucinich and, say, Arianna Huffington got together and formed a leadership coalition to run in the next presidential election.

OBAMA standing at 6'1 or around...would be beaten up BAD

in one round by the LITTLE 5'7'' Filipino Boxer - Manny Pacquiao....

and obama wouldn't know what hit him....

The truth of the mater, Obama pulled a superb con job. His "hope" and "change" were nothing but a snake oil salesman pitch. He knew exactly what the people were yearning for and suckered them right in.
He was lying from day one and is still lying constantly using his skillful oratory.
I really believe he came knowing exactly that he will discredit progressives and castrate them and shift the mood of the country to the right for a very long time to come. That is his assigned role by the power-that-be.
Obama is a fraud and definitely is no leader of men or anything.!

commoner3

And yet, when discussing Obama's weak knees and misdirection at a holiday party, my friend said "Like Nader" - As a long time Nader supporter I was floored - Until I realized once again that every time someone fights for whats right (like Ralph), they are smeared in the media until they have no credibility with the trusting masses.

Obama is not the Angel of Mercy, he is the Devil of Deceit.

I posted the link elsewhere of Drew Weston's blog on HuffPo this morning. His assessment was the same, but a lot longer and even more scathing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/leadership-obama-style-an_b_398813.html?page=19&show_comment_id=36746481#comment_36746481

Nader says, in re Obama's failures, "personality is decisive." --No, Ralph, it is not Obama's personality but his politics that are the rub: His politics are the mainstream liberal (reformist) face of the contemporary corporate capitalist/imperialist status quo; which is another way of saying that politics is the vehicle of economics. Politicians personify political categories; Obama's various absurdities are imbroglios of contemporary liberalism, not personality defects. (Witness the many "strong personalities"--such as Rahm Emanuel--who surround Obama, and share his politics.) Nader concedes as much in his closing reference to "the liberal and progressive community that elected him [Obama]"--which, while implying much that is negative about the politics of reformism in contemporary America, says nothing about the personalities of the credulous who embraced Obama's liberal con artistry.

The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (535-475 BC) said that 'character is destiny.' He might have added that 'personality is decisive.' Where is Barack Obama in this framework?"

Styx, Ralph.

It is easy to agree with everything Mr. Nader has to say.

That we project our need for real transformative politics into a single leader is or, perhaps, has become the way the game is played. Presidential campaigns spend millions duping a public eager for a single figurehead that will represent its most cherished hopes and take them from smoke and dreams into a concrete reality in much the same way the alchemists of the post Roman era attempted to create gold out of lead or other less "transformative" materials and were alternately reviled or invested with the powers of the divine (or both) because of their attempts or their double talk about those attempts.

Where does the real problem lie?

Is it with the chosen individuals who, once they are invested with leadership through their own chutzpah and a very pricey public relations mentality, are simply unable to live up to the vaunted and entirely unrealistic expectation they and the gullible, hungry, public create?

Or does it lie with a public that is too eager to make kings and saints out of mortals in a world in which it sees itself being sucked down by its mortal fallibilities its chosen leaders cultivate into crises, massacre and cultural droughts and famines?

I propose the fault lies elsewhere.

In the Venn diagram of where the fault lies the two options described above would be smaller and intersect with the real problem: 1) the way we choose and promote our administrative heads of State has either gone awry or was never successfully designed to protect the intent of the founders to keep kings and emperors and other autocrats out of, particularly, the Oval Office… or 2) the way we choose and promote our leaders does not dissuade us enough from the human tendency to make heroes out of leaders before the have become heroic... that is, to invest kingly-ness into the decidedly un-kingly even in a system that was purposely designed to attempt to prevent a return to the tyranny of Kings and Emperors, Popes and Caliphs.

I believe the founders understood this and tried, as far as their vision would allow them to, to design a fool-proof system that would bar the occurrence of tyranny. Thomas Jefferson especially, and perhaps personally due to his own inner struggles with his own tyrannical behavior at his plantation Monticello, understood what he wanted to create, understood the inherent attraction of the tyrannical.

But the problem may lie in the limitations of how Jefferson and the Founders understood human nature, and how strong the structure of governing would have to be, how immoveable in their flexibility the checks and balances would have to be built, in order that the governing body, and the public who provide it with its power, are able to resist the urge, particularly in bad times, to search for and/or invest tyranny into one person or a small group of people.

Unfortunately the historical drift of this error, this under-vision of the power of the attraction to tyranny, has caused what looks to be a rift in the body politic of the American experiment. Or perhaps it is more aptly compared to a tumor. We had previous intimations of this malignant growth in the structure of the body of our system of checks and balances and we were able to manage some cursory but largely cosmetic surgeries and poultices.

Unfortunately, like an ice berg, much of the sickness lie under the surface; or like some illnesses, much of the reason and catalyzing energy lies in the genetics, the inbred design... in the founding structures of how the body is made. We could name these catalyzing and revealing events in our history from slavery to Nixon and more, each of us with our own ideas, perhaps, of which events were most telltale as the symptoms of this congenitally-based and/or catalysed problem, but perhaps it was not until George W. Bush arrived that it became apparent just how weak our system could be.

So what can we do? The system resists real change, and in spite of the transformative and/or transactional natures of any of our leaders, the structural insufficiencies remain and will be passed down and inherited. Rifts and tears and poxes and blockages will not be healed by those who cannot see adequate ways out of the mass of related symptoms that they are, in fact, a part of. They cannot cure the insufficiencies through being a part and parcel of them.

What can we do?

1. Resist the urge to look for leaders outside of ourselves

2. Understand and act upon the notion that we are the leader of the leaders

3. Do not accept the characterizations of our leaders as saviors or the symbolization of them as kingly or queenly.

4. Listen to what our leaders have done, not what they say they will do

5. Educate our children in the possibility of real change; inoculate them with the hope that the structural insufficiencies that have brought us to this point can and must be changed if the country is to survive with its idea intact

6. Educate ourselves and our children that we are the bearers of any real change, not our leaders. It must come from US.

7. Teach them automatic skepticism of any information that comes from the leaders and/or their proxies. Teach them to scrutinize carefully so they will recognize a proxy when they see one.

8. Invent new ways of preventing tyranny in your home and in your family and in your community no matter how big or how small.

9. Go on as if we can, regardless of the evidence.

10. Understand that the future cannot be predicted, but can be formed.

HAPPY SOLSTICE!

I often find myself remembering (as little as I know) Henry A. Wallace.
A few years ago, I watched a program about this man who was one of the most important sources of the "New Deal" transformation of the United States of America. Toward the end of the program, after watching how Wallace had done so much to improve the lives of so many and had gone from a position of enormous influence to a position of (undeserved) public hatred, an historian tried to sum up his life as "being on the wrong side of history."

That statement haunts me on a daily basis. I think it is one of the stupidest statements I've ever heard any historian say, and yet, I can't shake it.

Barack Obama seems to me to be almost the opposite of Henry A. Wallace. Here we have a man who is still celebrated around the world even as he has done next to nothing to benefit anyone outside of corrupt power. He seemingly is patently ON the RIGHT side of history.

Thank you Ralph Nader. Even if I am just a fool on the losing side of this joke called history, I am always thankful that I've had the chance to vote for you.