Oh when degree is shagged which is the ladder of all high designs, the enterprise is sick.  ...the primogeniture and  due of birth, perogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels but by degree stand in authentic place.  Take but degree away, untune that string and hark what discord follows.., Shakespeare

OK nothing to see here any more, the republican primary is a done deal.  It was fun while it lasted.  Romney will win the republican nomination for president, no doubt, but who really doubted it?  I'm bored with this 2012 stuff already.  I already have a clear idea who's going to win the general too, but that's another story and I'll try to keep my prejudice out of it.  But based on clear and irrefutable precedents let's just say it will be a great surprise if Romney loses the republican primary.  I'd say it's high time we start looking ahead to see if we can't determine who the likely candidates will be in 2016. 

The republican party is really extraordinarily predictable.  They are like the landed gentry.  I mean this more in awe than disrespect. Romney is the clear heir apparent for a party that adores structure even when it declares it doesn't, even when it thinks and says it is revolutionary and radical, it is still predictably hierarchical.  Hard to believe in this crazy, muddy, madcap democracy of ours with all the qualifiers such as money and innovation of policy and doubt and change and debate and personality and potential slip-ups and sudden upsets and shifting menus of concerns, that in retrospect the outcome of republican presidential primaries should have been so forehead-slappingly predictable before hand.
 
Look at the record: Romney was the presidential runner-up to McCain, right?  McCain as nominee was the runner-up eight years before to George W. Bush.  I guess you could say George W. was something of an outlier because he'd never run for president before, but you can hardly consider him an outsider when he's the eldest son of the last sitting republican president, eight years before, also named George Bush.  Wedged between these Bushes like a small frightened animal was Dole, the runner-up to George H.W. Bush.  He was in turn the runner-up and vice-president to Ronald Reagan who was himself runner-up to a sitting, albeit appointed, republican president, Gerald Ford. 

With all the thousand threads of variables, it seems persistence is the only key to merit and past position the only guarantor of future republican nomination.  The republicans always have an understudy in the wings readying himself for the next election, and its invariably the runner-up to the preceding nominee that gets the nod and it is always from that extremely exclusive pool that their next republican president, god and electorate willing, is chosen. But that paradigm which has endured the last thirty years is in danger, it won't endure another election.

The front runner for runner up right at the moment of this writing is Newt Gingrich.  If he wins he would have already destroyed the mold.  But if he comes in second he doesn't fit the republican structure well and wouldn't fit as a candidate in 2016 either.  I actually think Gingrich would be an interesting candidate for 2012 and one you can't say the republicans don't deserve, after all he's pretty much the horse they rode in on and republicans in congress are still heavily dependent on the slash and burn tactics he pioneered.  But he's a destructive force and though it's tempting to enjoy the satisfying spectacle of Gingrich doing to the republican party what he's already done his best to do to the country, the image of the Pillsbury dough boy coming to the nation's salvation on a white charger is not so wonderfully edifying a sight to the nation as it may have at first seemed in the backwater primaries of South Carolina. 

The republican establishment will have work fast to put him back in the box.  If they don't he will certainly split the republican party apart. Watching Gingrich work South Carolina must be what it was like watching Huey Long operate in Louisiana several generations ago.  Like Long he is portraying himself as something of a populist dictator.   But unlike Reagan who, when he challenged Ford, was seen to have been operating from a matter of principle, Gingrich can never really be seen as operating from anything other than from hubris and unprincipled ego, which does not wear well in the public consciousness the longer it is experienced.  After all, he's already said he would arrest any federal judge he disagreed with to keep them from their alleged dictatorial tendencies by embracing his own dictatorial tendencies greedily as a long lost lover. And he would put poor kids to work cleaning the latrines in our schools for wealthier kids in order to teach these unfortunates their subordinate status in our society early.  He can never achieve the same loyal runner-up status of Romney even if he comes in second this time as his ultimate recommendation for a position as front-runner next time.  

Because for all their current pseudo rebeliousness, the rebels without a clue impostures and hyperbole they employ, the republican rank and file adore authority. They relish being told what to do. They only hate and react against oppression when they are convinced that all the upsetting aggravation and uppityness is coming from outside or from down below, from the devils they don't know rather than the leaders they do. They revere and honor great wealth and power not as if it had been worked for and hard won but as somehow having almost been ordained upon those who possess it as if bestowed from on high.   

Republicans don't even mind, in fact they prefer, decisive class distinctions in their paternal world.  It fits with their orderly sense of things, which provides them a peculiar degree of comfort, security and even a sort of odd, vicarious privilege in this uneven, unforgiving and unpredictable age.  So if the wealthy should have, or grant themselves privileges that most don't have, pay fewer taxes and preach to the evils of sloth - no matter how lazy they are themselves - this is just the natural order of things.  Their rights are god-given, unimpeachable and worthy of deference almost no matter how much these gifts may have been latterly abused by their recipients. 

So who are the likely candidates for 2016?   Shaky as it now seems, let's place a predictive template atop our next presidential election.  If the past holds true we ought to be able to predicate the future on the past.  It should matter whether Romney wins or loses this upcoming election but only conditionally.  Republican heirs can wait eight years easy without losing their primogeniture status.  In 2016 then, if there is an open seat on the republican side the candidate should be the clearest runner-up in this year's primary - Ron Paul - some say.  That is at least if, as some predictions have it, he should persist this year throughout the entire primary process and  receive the second largest number of delegates (and of course not start a third party, disloyalty is never forgiven by republicans), he would be this year's runner-up.

But there's a problem, Paul is too old and though this may not be a point of absolute disqualification according to rules of primogeniture he is, well, also a little too crusty to be taken seriously.  So, and to their credit several conservative pundits and prognosticators have already suggested a sort of bait and switch, which  proves they know their party's tendencies and so - how about his son - Rand?  He would be the heir apparent of the heir apparent.  Nice, not perfect but perfectly acceptable under republican unwritten rules of republican primogeniture.

To understand this better it's sort of like saying the King of England should also be the King of France because his mother's childless sister was married to the Holy Roman Emperor seventy-five years prior to the death of his cousin the Duc d'Anjou whose marriage was officially annulled by Pope Leo XVII in a spat over the Albigensian heresy which enabled the daughter of his wife, a minor Hessian Princess by birth named Hildegard, to marry Peter the Great of Russia and ... well, you get the drift. It's very complicated stuff this primogeniture business.

But here is another possibility, the only other possibility that I know of if Romney gets the nomination.  That is Jeb Bush.  Bush boys have a long history - short in number of occurrences but long in duration of trial period -of lying in the weeds in wait like certain species of cicadas do until eight years after the last Bush was president, and then suddenly rising up out of nowhere and running and winning.  I mean by this, of course, George W. following after George H.W.

So here's my prediction, informed with the latest scientific knowledge and purest knock on wood certainty: Jeb Bush vs. Rand Paul for the republican nomination for presidency in 2016.   Of those two, I should give it to Bush over Paul.  The heir apparent, even second son heir apparent to an ex-president who is also younger brother to another former president, and also happens to be older than his rival, a rival that is a mere heir apparent to an apparent heir, should win easily.   For when in doubt, republicans honor age, duty and perseverance over a fresh face (ugh, the very thought! Gauche!) any day. A younger son of a past president should always be an apparent heir over an heir apparent whose parent hasn't been a president in the past.

Wow that's not too strong.  The strain is weakening.  Paul would at best be only a runner-up by proxy.  A Bush would be great but there is a difference between himself and his big brother, a sitting governor is in a stronger position to run for higher office than a former one who hasn't been in office since.  Gingrich?  Santorum?  Weak and weaker.  Two time losers.  The republican party as we knew it seems to be coming to an end.  The old coalition is fracturing.
   
But if Romney wins in 2012, then what happens? I would have to say I see the same race shaping up for 2020, such is the durability of my foresight and the predictability of the republicans, with one caveat.  It's possible that Romney would groom a strong VP who would also then have an apparent claim as an heir apparent, even though VP's aren't generally strong candidates on the republican side.  There was Nixon but he lost in '60 and then waited eight years (there's that eight year locust plague again, the famous eight year hiatus) before he ran again in '68 and won. Of course, there was also George Bush 1 who was not only VP but had runner-up status to Reagan in 1980 to bank on. This double primogeniture and dual heir apparentcy made him a perfect shoo-in for the republican nomination eight years on. But then there was also Agnew, Quayle and Cheney, enough said about them. 

And the democrats?  Who might be running in 2016?  Well there would be Biden, of course, but only if Obama wins not if he loses.  The only training for presidency among the democrats seems to be the VP to a seated president.   Democratic VPs are accorded considerable respect as candidates by their party such as Humphrey, Mondale (after a four year hiatus, remarkable for the dems) and Gore.  But they never win.  So Biden might have a tough row to hoe. Then there's Hilary Clinton.  Man or, I mean woman, she's a whole new category - not enough data, no precedents.  She might be a good choice but democrats don't have the shelf  life republicans do.  She was not only a president's first mate but also a runner-up for the nomination for presidency in her own right.  However, there's little example of democrats waiting eight years for a candidate to season before they'll vote for him - or her.  There are few examples of the same runner-up syndrome occurring on the democratic side that dominates the thinking on the republican side. 

So do I have a prediction as to who the democratic nominee for president will be in 2016?  Yes, Hilary Clinton, based on no precedent whatsoever, which is counterintuitively the only way one can predict the democrats.  But for 2020,  no way. No computer's large enough to weigh the variables.

Because often the democratic candidate comes in from left field.  Nobody expected Carter, Dukakis, Clinton. Kerry or Obama. There is no such thing as primogeniture or heir apparentcy on the democratic side.  There you just have one shot and it's a pure crap shot.  You have to pick your time perfectly, catch lightning in a bottle and ride a perfect wave to victory.  There is more magic to a democratic presidential nomination, though sometimes it turns out to have been a temporary spell from which the ensorceled electorate soon awakens, like a drunk from a binge wondering what the hell happened this time. There are no second acts in democratic politics whereas republican presidential politics consist of second acts almost entirely.

 President Obama - 2012

    Ironically or strangely depending how you want to look at it, President Obama is a leader who hasn't always seemed to entirely understand the movement he was leading.  He called for change and used the terminology of a great reformer but didn't really mean it.  He actually imagined himself a marginal reformer, and instead of the wholesale change that the country thought he was calling for he only envisioned offering adjustments, a tweaking of the system, a rotating the tires, changing the oil and a wash and wax, rather than a complete tune-up and overhaul.
    Obama promised change but misunderstood the resonance of his own message.  He thought he was the change, and as a black American his election was socially revolutionary, but the people were less concerned with the symbolism of his presidency than with the actuality of the long overdo reforms they expected him to deliver and have not seen forthcoming. Obama has had little sympathy with the desire of his supporters, however, actually showing ingratitude mixed with impatience toward them due to their lack of gratitude and growing impatience with him - to the point of being publicly dismissive of their goals. Compare the lack of regard Obama shows for his base with the incredible devotion the republicans show to theirs, even when the demands of the extreme right (so far right they are wrong) are untenable tending to irrational, and you'll be astonished.  To imagine George W. Bush dismissing the extreme wing of his party as the "professional" right as Obama (or at least his spokesman did without rebuke) did to the left is inconceivable.
    So, Obama's supporter's are upset.  They think he is moving too slowly. True.  But there is a fine art of leadership in a democracy only ever mastered by a very few. When properly done democracy frustrates everyone a little, which is generally a sign of health rather than stagnancy. To achieve momentous things, not just temporary advancements, you must lead the aggregate population toward broad based change rather than just lead one faction to the trough of its own narrow preferences. For if one takes one's oath to serve all Americans equally seriously and truly respects the dual political polarities that make up our electoral spectrum then - like an old, ill-fitting window sitting loose in its sash, that must be raised back and forth one side after the other to be raised at all - simple mindless partisanship must be transcended which requires far greater skill and patience in order to achieve real growth.  For only that program which accounts for and respects both sides of our ongoing political argument allows the country to move with measured speed ahead. A good democratic leader must take a wide swathe of the majority into account while he or she painstakingly massages public opinion in the appropriate direction which best comports with their own best instincts.
    It wasn't just that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it's that he chose the proper time to promulgate the decree that freed the slaves.  Clearly now, though he was much abused at the time by those who wished he would have moved faster (and reviled later by those who wished he had never moved at all), we see that to have done so sooner would have jeopardized his ability to do so at all. Close study of our best presidents like Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt exhibit almost the exact type of widespread discomfort with their resolve and impatience at their speed that Obama's supporters now register toward him.  Only in retrospect can the achievements of such presidents be accurately gauged. Therefore the republicans' "conservative agenda" which is designed to split the country and divide and conquer in order to profit a few but but never all and often not even many, has never achieved one single policy which is broad based enough to actually endure.  They have put all their legislative eggs in one side of the electorate's basket which can be, should be and will be replaced by a much broader vision as soon as someone capable enough arises to implement it. Yet they hold onto their injudicious positions like death itself and in election after election seek not consensus but a bare divisive, strategic, magical minimum of barely 50%.  It must almost hurt to consistently seek and settle for so little as this.
    Obama's credulous devotion to bipartisanship in his Health Care legislation at the beginning of his first term is a mutant variant on this tendency to inclusiveness.  Passing health care was a great achievement but was made more difficult by his penchant for bipartisanship. Bipartisanship in itself is no particular virtue if it is not sincere in its desire to broaden a piece of legislation and make it more properly inclusive.  In this case, however, trying to expand support for this legislation to make it less vulnerable to attack only succeeded in making more vulnerable. Instead of crafting the best bill he could with only democratic votes, which he presumably might have done, and then bearing those consequences, he actually narrowed its appeal and made it less flexible and inclusive in its final form.  It was a vain (in both senses of the word) and quixotic attempt to achieve minimal republican support rather than a valid attempt at achieving  greater legislative excellence that motivated the attempt. Seeking consensus prior to achieving revolutionary reform is something of an oxymoron.
    As if he was wielding a witching stick of bipartisanship he gravitated his argument to absolutely the weakest point on the political spectrum he could possibly find and still see health care passed which produced a hybrid concoction which pleased no one. And to be honest, I'm probably not alone in being unable to recall if he did achieve one or two republican votes and can't be bothered to look it up, because it never mattered anyway. To pretend this bill was bipartisan when everyone knew it wasn't was nothing but a pyrrhic gimmick which cost far more in the bill's perfection than was achieved by compensation in the public perception.  In fact, it took so long in the process that like, Hemingway's Old Man in the Sea, the great legislative fish he caught took so long to get to shore that every shark in the sea had had at it by then and in the public's mind had all but been picked clean before it was ever landed. 
    The result is that the signature piece of legislation in President Obama's first term wins him little public credit, though those who claim it is not a great and necessary and long overdo legislative step forward for our society are wrong. It will wear well as a great achievement, just not as good a political accomplishment as it should have been.
    Clearly the republicans played him, even President Obama has allowed as much. Some republicans, a precious few to be sure, pretended to want a bipartisan agreement.  They didn't of course.  They only wanted to pretend to their districts back home that they were objective servants of the people.  Then they pulled out after months of time-delaying haggling supposedly over concern that expanded health care for the people had nothing to do with the overall improved health of the country, when in fact they are intrinsically connected. Sick people don't make for a well nation.  
    When one of the last out the door, Olympia Snowe, with sly disingenuity after months of debilitating dithering atop decades of futility at trying to reform health care, repeated the current republican attack line word for word and said she didn't understand "what the rush was" (when the whole country knew what the rush was), you knew she could have never been serious about reform to begin with.  Or after Charles Grassley, another republican pseudo participant in the negotiations dropped out and immediately started dissembling about someone "pulling the plug on grandma" you knew the fix was in.  This in a nutshell sums up how much the republicans really valued democratic bipartisanship. Seldom have such dishonest intentions been so unambiguously displayed. Stings work best when the mark never catches on how he has been taken in. 
    Still, even though President Obama knew he had been had he didn't learn his lesson and let the republicans, via John Boehner, roll him again in the debt ceiling, government shut down crisis. There again the President gave concessions publicly in advance to achieve a broad agreement that the republicans had no intention of meeting, immediately repudiating the negotiations after having given in on no concessions of their own.  One wonders if this president has finally grown to understand that whatever else may be true, the republicans do not mean him well.  They are more than willing to harm the country by means of hurting him and are far more avid about having their jobs, especially his, than doing them when they get them.  If president Obama is reelected he must absolutely stand for something more than - and he will not be reelected until he does - a pathological desire to compromise with those who have a pathological desire not to compromise with him.

The Drowning Man Strategy    

    But in an odd, counterintuitive way these tactical failures may have been a blessing in disguise.  If Obama has a fault - just ask his supporters - it is his great penchant for preemptive compromise.  However, consistently giving the republicans what they want has only made them ever greedy for more.  By this time there is no compromise the most extreme of them will ever accept, thinking an even greater capitulation will be forthcoming.  To their detriment this has shown them up for what they are.  Users and abusers of our system of government.  There is not an honest bone of governance in their body politic, it is win at all costs-to the nation.  As their policies have left them more and more exposed to the public, the subtler minds among them have tried to restrain them, which has in turn exposed fractures within their coalition.
    In Obama's case a certain benign passivity, of not overreacting to provocation and a supremely confident ability to let large issues ripen, is actually a rare leadership quality.  To let the opponents of progress play themselves out, to watch their arguments, however belligerently and provocatively and insultingly they are aired, float about and pollute the atmosphere for a while before their odious odor finally dissipates with their merit, is often actually the most efficacious means to progress through difficult trials and circumstances.  The direct ego-satisfying confrontation of bare bones politics is not only messier but often less comprehensive in its solution. Though more immediately rewarding to some, in the long run unnecessary turmoil and recrimination however satisfying it seems at the time, makes the work progress even more slowly. Sometimes only by letting an argument fully expand within the context of time, like gaining an aerial perspective on a rugged landscape, can you identify the proper route to take through the endless thickets of possibility and achieve a more farsighted and sustainable level of advancement with any degree of accuracy. The best way to clear unruly opponents out is to give them enough rope to hang their theories on and then, like Mohammed Ali, rope-a-dope them, which is something that they believe they are doing to you which in fact is actually something you are doing to them.  
    Clearly Boehner and McCollum are among the worst and most hapless we have ever seen at their positions. They have been rope-a-doped. By always taking the easiest and most obvious and ultimately most onerous angle of partisan attack they have actually boxed themselves into their own corners. Meanwhile Obama is dancing around the ring, virtually unopposed and unscathed by any intelligent argument of the opposition, while they cower and mutter in their corners unable to even control their own people.  No one has really ever laid a hard blow on Obama yet, they just thought they had.  They have, however, kept him from achieving his ultimate success by obstreperous obstructionism and ceaseless rearguard maneuvering, which achieves nothing but delays everything.  
    This has left congress at its most despised level in history, which includes both parties to be sure, but with a lower level of regard reserved for republicans.  The question for democrats is how to convince the public to finally make the GOP pay for its cynicism. Whereas the republican strategy seems to be that of the Drowning Man Pathology, sure he will sink but determined to take everyone who tries to help down to the bottom with him.  And it's true, democrats in congress only rank slightly higher than republicans in their approval, but that's still a positive differential, which in normal electoral terms is meaningful.  If the numbers were more presentable, say in the range of 40-50% approval, the party on the losing end of the difference would be concerned but the republicans seem to think that because everyone's numbers are so low they will be somehow inoculated from coming out the loser in two way races all around the country.  Perhaps there's logic here but it sounds like a football team convincing itself that its somehow more admirable to lose by two touchdowns in a low scoring game than losing by three touchdown in a high scoring game.  In politics a loss is a loss, and however you cut it, they are still losing. Obama too, has suffered a malaise from the congressional inactivity and bad atmospherics but both he and the democrats still have a shorter rise to 50% than the republicans do with a lot more buoyancy and far less baggage.  Therefore, the republicans are engaged in a blatantly self-destructive strategy, one that seems designed by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but at the end of the day still signifying nothing, but failure.    
    The difference here cannot be overstressed  - ignored by the common press that avoids moral principles the way a dog's tail flails at flies.  Obama has actually been seen from time to time putting the interests of the country over his own and even over his party, while the republicans have put self-invested political interests over the interests of the nation time and again.  Of course, everyone generally does put their own self-interest first, even when they imagine themselves consumed with magnanimity; that is not a surprise.  But in choosing a leader for the country, unless you are of a very select set, your best interests will  most often be served by what serves the country best.  A leader who wears his crying greed on his sleeve, shouting "every woman and man for themselves" as he loots your burning house with you still in it, has a more limited appeal, particularly in straightened times, than one who is consistently seen trying to save the women and children first. 
    In short, Obama through his due diligence over these four years has staked out the pole position.  Blur issues as they may, ultimately this is what the nation will see through all the bombast and fog.  Therefore in the upcoming election most of the policy particulars, character issues and programs for the future, will be seen as only facets of this central tenet: Obama is a far more responsible and trustworthy steward of the nation's health and future than the alternative.  Once they try to break down the centrality of Obama's core position, the republican candidates will be tempted to riskier and more far-fetched claims against him, and put forward increasingly novel legislative prescriptions and countless contradictory proposals.  It's what losers do before they lose.  This is a feature which has already been well established in the republican debates designed to choose a standard bearer.  It will be in the shoals among these follies, caricatures and mischaracterizations that the eventual candidate is sure to founder.
    Even health care legislation, whether or not you agree entirely with its methodology, was something done with the good of the country in mind, whereas its opponents remain wedded to the existing system's massive inefficiencies and injustice which profit a few, inconvenience most and completely ignore as if they were pariahs a significant minority of the population.  Similarly, something like the Bush tax cuts could and should be seen as something grasping and self interested in the extreme, favoring the few over the many. It was crafted specifically to enrich the fabled 1% over the 99% though some money, accidentally we must presume, may have trickled down a ways, clearly the malevolent design was to keep the majority of the nation's profits flowing ever upwards, never back down. 
     While his style of leadership is laid back as opposed to someone who was an inveterate grandstander say, like George W. Bush (think of his signature "Mission Accomplished" moment) whose administration never let an irrelevant subtlety go unhighlighted nor left an important fact unslighted.  The Bush administration was self-congratulatory in the extreme, and tried to make his presidency more about the president than the nation.   In these amplified times that is not to a leader's credit.  Crude adherence to a personality in the short term will never be quite as gratifying or enduring to a nation as considered allegiance to a more capacious philosophy over the long haul.  Though Obama's leadership diffuses credit and is not always as simplistically creditable, upon proper reflection, it will wear far better. And faced with a choice, his type of leadership is not only preferable in a time of crisis but will almost always prevail.

The Dam Republicans

This is not to say that President Obama hasn't made mistakes.  Our system usually rewards a simple consistent theme or two which a political campaign must be woven around. More cerebral candidates and campaigns sometimes struggle with this and lose the thread of their own argument somewhere in the sewing.  Obama certainly has had a hard time phrasing issues simply and starkly enough for popular black and white consumption. He is a consummate ameliorator, consistently trying to round the edges off wedge issues.  The republicans do a far better job at sharpening the same issues he is trying to soften.  Unfortunately this is their only gift, as they seem to do little else well at all, and never actually desire to solve any of the wedge issues they constantly hone. On the other hand democrats like to believe that Americans will always respond to a well reasoned argument once it's been well  put forward once (or twice for the slow witted) - but they don't.   
    It doesn't mean you are a propagandist if when you make a good point, if it is good, you repeat it.  Any good point can bear repeating and often does, even again and again. Obama has exhibited little patience for this kind of educable give and take with the nation.  
    This seems to be a truth that Obama has a had time accepting as even when his administration has a winning argument they may repeat it several times, and then it is heard no more.  Repetition is not the behavior of a simpleton, gibberish is.  Repetition is sometimes the outward manifestation of a sound mind; if it is right it is right, if it works it works, why change it just for the novelty of saying something else?  Too often Obama seems to get bored with the tiresome arguments put forward against him and rather than dignify them with wasted time in refutation, merely gives in to them or lets them fester until they've grown to perceptions.  For a while democrats used the slogan of "do-nothing" republicans to describe the behavior of their opponents.  It seemed to be gaining some traction.  But then they grew bored, they were outlasted, and quit repeating themselves even though the obstructionist behavior has not stopped but if anything has grown worse.
    This is weakness in fact as well as in the public's mind.  President Obama must not only do a better job framing his messages, he must not flinch from contrast, though it seems foreign to his nature. So far in his first term he has done an admirable job turning the other cheek and blunting the sharp edges of his policies by rounding contentious issues off with compromise.
     Refusing to get completely mired in destructive acrimony he has tried to rise above partisanship but now he must realize that he is the leader of his own party.  All of our great presidents were able to not lead the country but do so relying on the solid agency of their own party as their base.  Presidents like FDR and Reagan were avidly partisan and yet able to avoid fulfilling the worst of their party's pretensions while achieving approval of a large majority of Americans and earning the admiration of both. The worst thing Obama can be is indifferent, a small bore reformer, which is exactly what he will be if he forever tries to stand above the fray.
  Still, his overall record is admirable.  The wars he inherited are winding down.  His foreign policy, unlike Bush, is notable both for its success and for its lack of excess.  al Qaeda is on the run and the US is finally becoming a progressive supporter of revolutionary change in the world again, not as Wolfowitz and Cheney would have had it - as neo colonialist plunderers and military invaders, but as real partners who can confidently stand to patiently wait and profit vicariously from the continued expansion of freedom around the globe.  His only sticking point is the economy.  But even that has finally shown signs of starting to turn around.  If in eight months it is off the front pages the republicans won't have a single legitimate thread of attack against the Obama administration.
    Ironically the second area of weakness he has as we approach the 2012 election is of his own making.  It is in his difficulty of connecting with the people which has led to the greatest residual doubts about the viability of his candidacy for his second term.  This has made him seem an enigma to his friends, weaker than he really is to his enemies and suspicious to the independents.  Fortunately for him events outside his presidency have come to his aid to suggest his platform.  The urgency of the Occupy Wall Street movement has, in the same way the Tea Party movement hurt him in the off election, helped him identify a few salient points which should enable him to connect much better with the people.  There are signs he is already taking this to heart and sharpening his message accordingly. This is ironic because his ability to communicate is his greatest skill.  It serves a purpose only when it is used, however.  Though it should worry the republicans that in a campaign where he will be compelled to speak he will be at his best. He has oratorical skills far beyond any would-be opponent. 
    On the other hand he has his opponent's party dead to rights as dead dog obstructionists.  And if anything the push for change which swept him into election has only grown stronger as it is remained unrequited.  President Obama is still, if he can sell it, the one most likely to bring forth the change the public desires.  Counter that with the republican party's policy of debt, negativity, division and gridlock; a party that only lives for bad news, which if it doesn't have it invents - impeachments, permanent filibusters, government shutdowns, terror scares, etc., and Obama still looks like a guiding light to the future.  It is time to finish the job that the republican obstructionists have tried their best to prohibit him from doing.  But he needs to go on the attack for this, and there are signs that he is starting to rise to the challenge.  After all when your opponent keeps climbing their morbidly obese self farther and farther out on a flimsier and flimsier limb sooner or later you owe it to yourself, heck, you owe it to them, to saw it off under them.
    Nothing is now more obvious as the republicans and Boehner have had to swallow their pride and back off from yet another phony self-generated crisis, this time over the two month extension of the payroll tax reduction.  Without going into any details, they were caught with their pants down (or kilts up, as it may be, as they were rather bizarrely invoking the film Braveheart, no less, about Scottish insurrectionists who not only lost the war but saw their leader drawn and quartered - sorry John) or with their hand in the piggy bank stealing pennies - whichever image you prefer - after months of denying it was them stealing all the pennies.  
    In retrospect this capitulation will be seen as a key moment (yesterday, December 22, as I finish writing this) on which the election turned.  This will lead to another drop in congressional republican poll numbers and further prove Obama's point about their obstructionism and make it more and more difficult for them to continue with their signature, self-defeating policy of do-nothingism in the future, as the blame for legislative failure will be ever more quickly assigned to them for any delays from this point on.   
    Meanwhile republicans are still banking on banking to pull them through.  They have done this before.  Nicholas Biddle was head of the US bank (the privately held precursor of the Federal Reserve) and he tried to wreck the American economy to prove Andrew Jackson in the wrong (even while graphically proving his point) for not being willing to recharter his bank because Jackson thought it had too much economic might.  And Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover refused to rescue the economy from the jaws of the Great Depression if it would have inconvenienced them or their friends preconceptions in the least, before being swept aside by FDR.  The republican party has held the American economy hostage before in order to keep a preferential agenda favorable to the few but detrimental to the many.  
    Today again, there is an economic drought, massive discrepencies in wealth and poverty are expanding.  It's the same old story.  Those who would hoard the water of money and the beneficial privileges that this affords them but have never really earned or deserved, are refusing to open the dam's floodgates though the countryside downstream is parched, the economy thirsts, businesses are closing and the crops drying up.  Meanwhile the flood water held back by these Dam Republicans continues to build, cracks are showing in the dike, tiny rivulets of water snake down the sides of the dangerously bulging concrete pilasters of their policies, meant to last generations, but now there are no longer even enough fingers to plug the holes. Not even "Dutch" Reagan could do it.      
   And even after all of the obvious problems we face they still are trying to keep government all dammed up, hands tied behind its back, and won't release the pressure on the economy even to save the creaking, cracking superstructure of their damn artificial dam policies.  But the rain up country continues to fall unabated, water levels continue to swell.  Yet every candidate in the republican primary for the presidency seeking to run against Obama, is calling for more tax cuts for the very, very well to do, even when it clearly necessitates raising taxes on the middle class and denying services to the needy.  Still the dam muckety mucks of the party are damming up property downstream, buying up lots and building expensive homes on the banks of the pretty little streams of their own delusions below the towering dam as if there were no tomorrow possible from the way things were yesterday.  This is highly damming behavior. And they will be damned for it. 
    That said, Obama should win this upcoming election hands down. Though this is not perhaps as bold a projection as it may seem now, I admit, after everyone has had a peek ahead to the projected opposition, few elections seem easier to handicap.  Of course, anything may happen (my requisite disclaimer) but if the democrats in congress could put some separation between themselves and the even more despised republicans in congress, by say, actually proposing a platform of real, meaningful, across the board reforms, the republicans could be heading for real trouble this fall. But, because they have a tendency to live in their own echo chamber, I guarantee you they will be the last ones to see it coming.

    Some things never change.  They won't no matter how many times you correct wrong opinions and bad behavior they continue to recrudesce like sludge from the polluted septic systems of the world.
    Take the tea party.  They style themselves to be one thing but are exactly in opposition to what the original Boston tea party favored. This tea party is reactionary where that Tea Party was revolutionary, therein is a great divide.
     So, according to Thom Hartmann from his original sources, the Boston Tea Party was opposed to unfair British tax breaks given to a giant multi-national corporation - the East India Company - designed by a too compliant parliament to give them a virtual monopoly on the American market.  Yet the tea party today, lower case, is rabidly in support of tax breaks for corporations and extraordinary tax breaks for the wealthy few who control them.  It's like the song, "if lovin' the right wing is wrong, I don't wanna be right," or something like that, not so much in God we trust, as on GOP we dote. 
    Strangely and embarrassingly enough the republican party is the vehicle which has allowed the tea party to gain steam. (The steam engine is an apt example here as they adamantly oppose high speed rail - and modernity in general.) The republican party is so steeped in tea today it may as well be called Lipton.
    Their policy of deny, stop, impede, block the very notion of, disinform and keep the nation from its necessary resources - all in order to continue to enrich the rich while slowly disenfranchising and impoverishing the plurality, is in impressive denial of their own best heritage as well as the best interests of the nation.  
    Rather they enthusiastically harken back to the know-nothings, the nativists, the states rights, and religious puritan (teetotalers too) crowd of Lincoln's time who, as founder of the republican party, rejected the very philosophies that his successors are embracing. 
    Lincoln, in fact, aligned himself with the old Whigs of Henry Clay which went all the way back in unbroken lineage to Alexander Hamilton. When Lincoln ran for the legislature he believed in social tolerance, internal improvements and a central bank - all anathema to republican tea-totalers today (though anti-Federal Reserve sentiments may not yet be a universally held belief among them (yet - wait till next election as they continue their southern plunge farther and farther to the right).
    So the modern anti-tax, anti-spend, deficit spending (yes, I know the last two contradict but they don't care), anti-government, religious fundamentalist, know-nothing, do-nothing, say anything, rabidly obstructionist republican party of today represents tendencies not only not native to it, but tendencies which the best of the republican party has always fought vehemently against. 
    Nothing new in this.  Many of these same negative, highly regressive elements have been in evidence from the very beginnings of the nation.  Most of these people fought if not for the British at least against the revolution and later, against the ratification of the constitution. Several of our Founding Fathers, Jay, Madison and Hamilton, wrote a series of essays which came to be known collectively as the Federalist Papers. The one by Hamilton quoted extensively below might have been specifcally designed to refute every false proposition lately put forward or action taken by (when they were in power in the last administration) McCollum and Boehner, the republican leaders in congress. This illustrates just how "new" our Founders still are at the same time revealing just how passe' their attackers remain. 
    I have edited it for length and rearranged a few of its parts for sake of continuity but nothing has been added to the power of Hamilton's own words.
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Concerning the General Power of Taxation

From the New York Packet.
Friday, December 28, 1787.
Author: Alexander Hamilton

To the People of the State of New York:

Money is... the vital principle of the body politic; which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution. From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue; either the people must be subjected to continual plunder, as a substitute for a more eligible mode of supplying the public wants, or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy, and, in a short course of time, perish.

...the federal government ought to possess the power of providing for the support of the national forces; in which proposition was intended to be included the expense of raising troops, of building and equipping fleets, and all other expenses in any wise connected with military arrangements and operations. 

Let us (say)... a war breaks out. What would be the probable conduct of the government in such an emergency? ...would it not be driven to the expedient of diverting the funds already appropriated from their proper objects to the defense of the State? It is not easy to see how a step of this kind could be avoided; and if it should be taken, it is evident that it would prove the destruction of public credit at the very moment that it was becoming essential to the public safety.

To imagine that at such a crisis credit might be dispensed with, would be the extreme of infatuation. In the modern system of war, nations the most wealthy are obliged to have recourse to large loans. But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures for borrowing by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying? The loans it might be able to procure would be as limited in their extent as burdensome in their conditions. They would be made upon the same principles that usurers commonly lend to bankrupt and fraudulent debtors, with a sparing hand and at enormous premiums.

But these are not the only objects to which the jurisdiction of the Union, in respect to revenue, must necessarily be empowered to extend. It must embrace a provision for the support of the national civil list; for the payment of the national debts contracted, or that may be contracted; and, in general, for all those matters which will call for disbursements out of the national treasury. The conclusion is, that there must be interwoven, in the frame of the government, a general power of taxation, in one shape or another.

In America... the government of the Union has gradually dwindled into a state of decay, approaching nearly to annihilation. Who can doubt, that the happiness of the people... would be promoted by competent authorities in the proper hands, to provide the revenues which the necessities of the public might require? The present Confederation... (has) an unlimited power of providing for the pecuniary wants of the Union.

But proceeding upon an erroneous principle, it has been done in such a manner as entirely to have frustrated the intention. Congress, by the articles which compose that compact... are authorized to ascertain and call for any sums of money necessary, in their judgment, to the service of the United States; and their requisitions, if conformable to the rule of apportionment, are in every constitutional sense obligatory upon the States. What the consequences of this system have been, is within the knowledge of every man the least conversant in our public affairs, and has been amply unfolded in different parts of these inquiries. It is this which has chiefly contributed to reduce us to a situation, which affords ample cause both of mortification to ourselves, and of triumph to our enemies.

What remedy can there be for this situation but... in a change of the fallacious and delusive system of quotas and requisitions? What substitute can there be imagined for this ignis fatuus in finance, but that of permitting the national government to raise its own revenues by the ordinary methods of taxation authorized in every well-ordered constitution of civil government? Ingenious men may declaim with plausibility on any subject; but no human ingenuity can point out any other expedient to rescue us from the inconveniences and embarrassments naturally resulting from defective supplies of the public treasury.

I believe it may be regarded as a position warranted by the history of mankind, that, IN THE USUAL PROGRESS OF THINGS, THE NECESSITIES OF A NATION, IN EVERY STAGE OF ITS EXISTENCE, WILL BE FOUND AT LEAST EQUAL TO ITS RESOURCES.

The more intelligent adversaries of the new Constitution admit the force of this reasoning; but they qualify their admission by a distinction... This distinction, however, would violate the maxim of good sense and sound policy, which dictates that every POWER ought to be in proportion to its OBJECT; and would still leave the general government in a kind of tutelage... inconsistent with every idea of vigor or efficiency.      

Taking into the account the existing debt, foreign and domestic, upon any plan of extinguishment which a man moderately impressed with the importance of public justice and public credit could approve..., we could not reasonably flatter ourselves, that this resource alone, upon the most improved scale, would even suffice for its present necessities. Its future necessities admit not of calculation or limitation; and... the power of making provision for them as they arise ought to be equally unconfined.  

If the opinions of those who contend for the distinction which has been mentioned were to be received as evidence of truth, one would be led to conclude that there was some known point in the economy of national affairs at which it would be safe to stop and to say: thus far the ends of public happiness will be promoted by supplying the wants of government, and all beyond this is unworthy of our care or anxiety. (Or as they might put it more succinctly today: "No new taxes or revenues - ever again!"- editor's note)

Its inevitable tendency, whenever it is brought into activity, must be to enfeeble the Union, and sow the seeds of discord and contention between the federal head and its members, and between the members themselves. It ought to be recollected that if less will be required from the States, they will have proportionably less means to answer the demand.

How is it possible that a government half supplied and always necessitous, can fulfill the purposes of its institution, can provide for the security, advance the prosperity, or support the reputation of the commonwealth? How can it ever possess either energy or stability, dignity or credit, confidence at home or respectability abroad? How can its administration be any thing else than a succession of expedients temporizing, impotent, disgraceful? How will it be able to avoid a frequent sacrifice of its engagements to immediate necessity? How can it undertake or execute any liberal or enlarged plans of public good?

Reflections of this kind may have trifling weight with men who hope to see realized in America the halcyon scenes of the poetic or fabulous age; but to those who believe we are likely to experience a common portion of the vicissitudes and calamities which have fallen to the lot of other nations, they must appear entitled to serious attention. Such men must behold the actual situation of their country with painful solicitude, and deprecate the evils which ambition or revenge might, with too much facility, inflict upon it.
___________________________________________________________--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The republican tea party justifies and glorifies their often noxious behavior by claiming they exemplify the spirit of the Founders. The question must be, Which Founders? Where?  When? and of What?" Of course with attitudes as nihilistic and greed-filled as theirs they could never be founders of anything but merely plunderers of what has already been built by others more far-sighted than themselves.
    Despite the fact that that they claim connection with some sort of original intent as their inspiration and a spiritual affinity with the "Founders," here we have Alexander Hamilton, who is both a Founder and an icon of conservatism as well as the first and most illustrious Secretary of the Treasury and the father of American solvency, who has his face stamped on the fifty dollar bill - found in a nearly point by point refutation of virtually everything the tea party republicans claim to stand for today.  
    Of course the situation we face today is different today, but only superficially.  Hamilton was faced not with opposition to big government but opposition to the establishment of a national American government in any form. If some republicans today sound as if they would abolish all effective government in this country today, as the bizarre and destructive debt ceiling debates dragged on, well, that must be just a passing coincidence.  Though some might be forgiven if they saw in the republicans selfish determination to enrich their friends at the expense of the rest of us, and in their refusal to see the larger framework and potential of the nation, a certain similarity of ilk between the naysayers of the two eras.  Some things never change.  Hamilton's vision and the foresight and patriotism of the Founders was proven right then, and their vision, if allowed to prevail now, will certainly prove as revolutionary now as it was then.  
    Meanwhile the republican party of today has beggared us, first by novel theories of economics which have led to massive systemic debt, but then by refusing to let any more responsible government raise revenues to attempt to cure us from the straightened fiscal circumstances they are responsible for putting us in, thus embarrassing us in the eyes of the world and reducing us to penury and destitution at home.
    They have done this simply by an intentional greedy wrenching of the entire taxcode of the US egregiously and unfairly in favor of the rich.  They then use the onerous unfairness they have built into their collection as a proof and wedge against any and all taxes in general.  As taxes on the middle class are confiscatory and on the wealthy light, the shrill cry of "no new taxes" has a particularly willing accomplice in the overburdened middle class which has been chiefly victimized by this process of calculated rapacity.    
    The only appropriate national response to this cruel political blackmail which holds our neediest citizens hostage to the extreme and exalted wealth of the very, very few is true tax reform which may begin to redress the endemic unfairness written into the current tax code.  This must necessarily include measures which will substantially raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Even if not all guilty as authors they all have been the chief beneficiaries of the corruption which has essentially profiteered our society for the last thirty years.
     It is time to raise their taxes in order to reduce taxes on everyone else and let our entire economy breath again.  Only then will the demagogic scream of "no new taxes" lose its appeal to the congenitally overtaxed and abused middle class. Only then will some degree of fairness and rationality return to our debate over raising revenues equal to rebuild our country's troubled economy and return us to the world fiscal sanity.
    This aligns the democrats and the Obama administration, rather unjustifiably, simply by default, with the best elements of our history - it puts them on the side of the better angels of our nature - if they will only rise to the occasion.  It has been frustrating to notice that they don't seem to recognize the historic opportunity and necessity which faces them.  They seem to be waiting for their greatness to be thrust upon them, rather than reach out in search of it themselves.  For even when they take the proper positions they do so with timidity, a lack of alacrity, defensively, as if frightened that the cannons of the republican propaganda machine trained upo them might actually be loaded with more than confetti.  
    As for the republicans no matter how you gauge it, they are arrayed on the wrong end of history, supporting the people and policies who've created all our problems rather than those who would rectify them.  They are the defeatists among us, the ones who fail to face the future squarely. They were the ones who tried to bring us back from the brink of history at the start of our country and are the ones who are determined to thwart all efforts at progress now. They wrap themselves in the flag yet dishonor by comparison the memory of those far better than them, when these reactionaries claim they are equivalent to the revolutionaries who founded the very American government they are still trying to undermine and destroy.

The Three Shells