no MLK

We can be respectful enough of the process to wait our turn, but now that the vote's over in MA, after the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, it's time to draw our impudent conclusion: Obama may yet be a great President, but he's no MLK, and sadly too, he is no Jackie Robinson. I don't think many people voted for him expecting him to be a combination of both. But I'd have settled for some sign that he might or could have been a bit of either. He's also not yet even Reagan in terms of transformational.

'Oh that's not fair, progressives are piling on, he's only had a year to right the horrors of the past 8, the Repos can't get back in power or it will only get worse' ... Maybe all of that is true. But focusing only on Obama as leader of the free world, he doesn't get a break. America is full of fat, drunk, and stupid so I don't care how hard he asked us to work. He has to lead too! We're naive, so what? He has to fight for what we the People want, if not for what he wants. Or at the very least, he has to create the perception that he's fighting. And the perception that I see out there right now is that because he's not fighting, progressives have soured on him or he's selling out to his corporate masters... And we get to vent about it here on this silly little blog.

Remember when Obama referred to the Senate's health care bill as the most important social legislation in 70 years? I don't recall him saying the same thing about the House bill... [please pass along the link if he did; I'm spent]. Let Pharma walk, that deal should not have been made in the 1st place. There might be reform, and it might actually work in the longer-term. But anything that passes, if it passes, could have been so much more if only the President had made the case for the moral necessity to take care of this country's sick. Meaning, we'll never know what he could have accomplished on this front because the perception is he never tried.

Speaking of never trying, how bad do you have to be as the D candidate to lose Ted Kennedy's seat in blue Mass., to some pick-up driving, nude-posing tea party wannabe? As bad as W was in setting the stage for Obama's rise, because this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. Still, tasty pick up there boneheads.

By the way, if only the Senate version matters, why take civics or government or history in school? The answer (via my daily baseball trivia calendar for 2010) -- because Dr. King was quoted in a book about Jackie Robinson saying this:

"Jackie Robinson made it possible for me in the first place. Without him, I
would never have been able to do what I did".

So what's our take-away here? Is it to engage in the blame game? If so, we kinda already did a little, especially with Mr. Buck-stopper himself. No, I would rather read as much as I can, e.g., from this guy, or to TPM's Josh Marshall in his hastily-cobbled but pretty accurate post-script, to then arrive at a more informed decision as to how best to proceed.

We could end up at the Full Cynical, game over, man. Game over. [And we mean that in the 'America's empire is already on the decline' sense; it won't take much more to bankrupt us all. If China doesn't foreclose, climate change should take care of the rest, maybe in 200-300 years if we're lucky?]

But maybe, just maybe, someone in a position of power, say the President (?) could rally the base, the troops and a whole mess in between, and get the $%^ done that we voted him to do. Most humans want the basics in life: health, the pursuit of happiness. Dr. King never took his eyes off the prize; we sometimes do. 40 years later and we're still not there yet. Amazing.