Gimme a break

Look, I yield to few in my conviction that Barack Obama lacks a center -- or, at least, lacks access to whatever center may be in there. But what's up with this ridiculous NY Times/CBS News poll? The findings themselves are entirely uninteresting -- what else could the outcome have been on this or any other controversial topic during a contentious campaign? The point was the question itself -- it's simply a meta-way of taking a shot at him. And it's the hypocrite calling the kettle black -- not only for the Times and CBS News, but for the poll's participants to criticize Obama for not having been a long-time supporter of gay rights. One can only assume some snark-monger decided this would be a good headline. Please.

Yes, one can only hope

As Krugman has continued to do for the past three years (more, if you count the 08 campaign), now Joe Nocera is making it clear what Obama should say -- saying it for him. Isn't that teleprompter enough?

Whoa

This is scary, if accurate. Scary re Europe, and scary re the US. I hope that the hermetic seal around our president has not repaired itself, and that he will recognize the direness of his straits. Politically speaking, he must seize the initiative, must start going hard after the banks and tying Romney and the whole GOP to them in any ways he can. Ross Douhat groks this, for chrissake.

Of course, even then, a collapse of the Euro within months may doom his presidency. And then, Gaia help us.

Some tempest

Some teapot. I hope the S.E.C. is planning to ask: What did Jamie Dimon know, and when did he know it.

Jamie Dimon? Now, why is that name familiar?

And yes, the correct outcome is clear. So glad you helped steer us away from Hillary Clinton, Bob.

Romney's assignment, if he chooses to accept it - updated

Here's how Romney wins the presidency: He runs against Tim Geithner and the too-big-to-fail banks. He attacks Obama's socialism for the rich, while portraying himself and the rest of the vulture capitalists as playing by the high-risk, high-reward rules of true capitalism: "We at Bain were never too big to fail. If we made bad bets, we were subject to the swift judgment of the market -- which is exactly how capitalism is supposed to work. But President Obama, Secretary Geithner and this Administration stepped in and distorted the market -- making the government of the United States a crony capitalist of historic proportions. I said at the time that the bailouts were wrong -- and we see now how right that was. The corruption of moral hazard continues to this day -- witness the latest outrage from JP Morgan Chase. This isn't what capitalism, or America, are supposed to be about. It's time to restore a true free-market economy, and get America back to work."

As Confidence Men and Frontline's "Money, Power and Wall St." make clear -- and as Krugman, Reich, Stiglitz et al. have noted for years -- Obama aided and abetted the looting of Main St. by Wall St. Romney can have his cake and eat it by singling out the big banks, while continuing to collect contributions from the rest of corporate America. Obama is genuinely vulnerable on this issue, and Romney would get a twofer -- appealing both to the Tea Party and to independents appalled when Citibank, Goldman Sachs and their brethren were made whole.

Will he do it? Probably not. It probably requires more political imagination -- and more acting skill (i.e., the capacity to project convincing outrage) than he possesses. So my guess is he won't accept this mission-eminently-possible. But I wish he would. Even if Obama did win, a debate framed in this way would create a lot of pressure to address financial reform in a more serious way in his second term.

Update: If Obama, Axelrod, Plouffe et al. have an ounce of political sechel, they will seize the opening created by the shaming of Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan Chase. They will forget that they ever had a good word for Dimon and Blankfein; forget that they let Geithner slow-walk the break-up of Citi, as Suskind reveals; forget that they have sat idle while Dodd-Frank was being dismantled before our eyes. They will run hard against the banks, starting right now -- and cutting off Romney's potential winning play at the pass. They will whip the Senate to ensure that none of these eviscerations of Dodd-Frank make it into law. Obama will talk over and over again about the need for a strong Volker Rule, to accompany his Buffett Rule -- and put out the word through surrogates that Volker would become Treasury Secretary in his second administration.

It was obvious all along

The new op-ed by Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann in the Washington Post is getting a lot of attention, and it's obviously salutary. The GOP should be called out as batshit crazy, and the media should be called out for not reporting that as fact. To have this piece appear in the Post, the Broderist temple of bipartisan orthodoxy, is good.

But the thing is, as Bob Somerby has been saying for 15 years, and as Ornstein and Mann remind us here, this is not a new state of affairs. And it was political malpractice of historically disastrous proportions for the Democratic Party not to have understood and fought against this. I have just finished reading Ron Suskind's Confidence Men, and its judgment on Barack Obama is devastating. He was incapable of doing this job, and is not growing into it. Far from being a quick study, he is rigidly locked into his own severely limiting psychic needs. He is incapable of making a decision. There was never any real-world opportunity for bipartisan agreement with this GOP. The pursuit of it was entirely a function of Obama, not of reality.

And now, the best option we face is to re-elect this guy, because the alternative is madness. It's a deeply depressing state of affairs.

Legalities

This valuable post by Big Tent Democrat argues that the "inactivity" argument -- on which the wingnuts' challenge to the individual mandate rests -- is unprecedented (pun intended), unconstitutional and specious.

If this is correct -- and it seems so to me -- it drives home how extraordinary it is that the current Court seems bent on applying this bullshit to thwart the people's will. What does it say when a majority of our definitive legal body is made up of fools, ideologues and charlatans? And how remarkable is this chapter in our nation's history, when the basic underpinnings of the United States Constitution's separation of powers are dissolving before our eyes? People like Dahlia Lithwick have speculated that Roberts will not want his tenure to go down in legal history as a partisan travesty -- but that assumes the goal is to preserve the Court's power and credibility. Maybe Grover Norquist rules the judiciary, as well as the legislature. Maybe the driving motive all across the Beltway (and in state capitols throughout this great land) is to reduce all branches of government to the size (or to a condition of pathos and contempt) where we can (and want to) drown them in a bathtub.