Is This as Good as It Gets From Obama?

Yeah, I'm disappointed, too. I thought we were sweeping into power; I
thought change meant Change. I believed all that talk about another
First 100 Days, a la Roosevelt. Well, that didn't happen. The question
is, is this as good as it gets from Obama, or is he pacing himself? He
may have a four and eight-year plan and they included a first year of
just gettin' to know you and not gonna rock the boat too much. Well,
Mission Accomplished on that.

It's still to early to lose hope in a guy as smart and talented as
Barack Obama. But I would counsel him to remember: If you're going
undercover to infiltrate how Washington works, so you become one of
them for a while, to gain their confidence, well, it can be just like
all those movies where a cop goes deep, deep, DEEP undercover with drug
people and -- fuck, he's a drug addict, too!

Logic tells me that really smart guys like Obama and Rahm Emanuel
know better what they're doing than I do. They certainly know things I
don't know. I think we have the same general goals and beliefs. And
this is what they do for a living -- I wouldn't even try it. But I will
never stop having this doubt: that maybe if they had really charged in
there riding the forceful energy of the historic election, and acted
like it was an emergency moment -- which it was -- they could have
gotten some big victories right up front, and there really could have
been an historic "first hundred days" for this administration and the
country. Instead of what happened, which is the Obamas got a dog. It
could have worked -- the country had given its endorsement to "...and
now for something completely different." There might have been a way to
knock the Republicans back on their heels right away, with the argument
that "The American people demanded we make these changes, and you are
unpatriotic to stand in their way."

We'll never know. Because that moment passed, and now it could
follow the pattern of World War I and devolve into boring, static
trench warfare where nothing really gamechanging happens while both
sides slowly bleed to death.

That said, I do not forget that if the election had gone the other
way, we'd right now have a barter economy and be at war with Honduras.