It was supposed to be so easy. Sure we have watched our politics debased over forty years, and elected a succession of crooks, incompetents, fools, rich out of touch fellows, self indulgent Democrats acting as Republicans (one actually) followed by an idiot who talked as if he was comic book character to serve as President. Yes, our attempts to control the way political campaigns are financed were seriously damaged by a foolish Supreme Court opinion, and we have looked the other way, bored to tears over the entire subject, as state and federal legislators turned over their work to whoever could contribute the most money to the quest to remain in office.

All we had to do was elect President Obama and all that damage, all that which has corrupted or system would just go away. One of the President's primary opponents captured the mood fairly well ridiculing the idea that by electing anyone as President we would be able to

stand up ...and say 'Let's just get everybody together. Let's get unified. The sky will open! The light will come down! Celestial choirs will be singing! And everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect!' Maybe I've just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear!"

That silliness was not why many of us voted for the man who is now President, but there can be little question many people worked hard and even voted for him expecting that, if he could not exercise superhuman powers, he would at least have regal ones.

After all, we are repeatedly reminded, the prior president and his vice president were able to accomplish their nefarious ends with ease:

just who other than the VICE President was responsible for us dropping the ball in Afghanistan to reorder our resources to an ill-founded invasion of Iraq?

There is considerable power within the Executive to LEAD this nation - even into ill-considered adventures such as the Iraq War if you are so inclined. But such leadership will never be realized in an effort to constantly triangulate advancement on issues regardless of the degree to which they contain a moral imperative to be realized. (see the nobly democratic Health Care Reform effort which has very effectively been triangulated into a "Health Insurance Industry Profits Enhancement and Protection Act.")

The people who just believed in this candidate, to the extent of trashing any other (Democrats included, of course) and believed that what he represented could be translated into radical change almost overnight (not even: some wanted Guantanamo closed while the inaugural balls were taking place and the prior President, Vice President and much of their appointees under arrest by the end of the first week) had to be disappointed. Sadly, though, many have decided that the nearly eleven months of this administration has been "a miserable failure" since

the planets are all in alignment for this nation to once again experience a major corrective move back toward the principles of democracy and economic justice

Even were that true, to accomplish those ends requires an enormous change in the way Congress operates, particularly the way its members get elected and re-elected, and nearly revolutionary changes in how out national political life operates. The quotation from President Kennedy's inaugural almost always comes to mind:

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

Yes, there are areas where President Obama and his staff need to improve. Paul Krugman has been among the loudest voices against the President's sunny views of the opposition and, as he has counseled, the White House needs to take notice that even the President's supposed "good friend," Senator Lugar, has been among those who filibustered against the overly modest recovery program which passed in the emergency days after the inauguration.

But neither President Obama, nor Rahm Emanuel are the problem. They are, in fact, the only route to a solution available to us. Tearing them down, walking away from the process, talking about a third party whose doomed to defeat candidate will mouth all of the demands you have, and oppose all of the injustices you see will help the Republicans elect another fool to the presidency, increase its presence in the Congress and otherwise frustrate what needs to be done.

You want to talk about war and peace, and health care, and justice and these are all very important issues. Some, such as the lack of health care and the massive unemployment which besets so many of us, cannot wait for the reform of our political system and need to confronted, however imperfectly we can do so, under the nearly absurd level of discourse to which we have descended where emergency funding for the military is held up until shortly after 6 A.M., in the midst of a blizzard a week before Christmas.

The issues which raise our emotions and passions must, however, take, in the main,a back seat to the only issue which can restore our government to some level which reflects the will of the people, rather than of those who can afford to engage the existing system under the current conditions.

The vice of the beltway is not "lobbying" per se. That various interests can afford to pay for lobbyists to meet members of Congress is not why we are losing. The idea that Senators and members of the House are being swayed by one-sided arguments from those who can hire people to make their case, while we cannot, is hardly the problem. This is not an intellectual matter where the members are considering various points of view and, in any event, the "lobbyists" are not that articulate.

The issue is money. Money for campaigns. Money to pay for television commercials. Money to answer one's critics. We all get bored by this subject and the intricacies of how campaigns are funded and the clever ploys to get around those rules. It is time for this community and rest of those who really want change, to roll up their sleeves and fight the only battle that will matter in the end. That battle, of course, must be fought under the rigged rules that money has already established, and as those resisting change in the way people pay for health care were able to use that system to their utmost advantage, they will redouble their efforts to defeat any meaningful campaign finance reform.

Linda Greenhouse, the former New York Times legal correspondent, blogged the other day about how long the Supreme Court has taken to decide a major campaign finance case argued twice before it. It was, as most of her work is, very insightful, and included a story that illustrated how much the raising of cash sucks up the air in the political world these days, at the obvious expense of the Big Issues. Yet, she also

confess[ed] to long-standing agnosticism on the campaign finance issue. I take the First Amendment arguments seriously, and I think that the provision of McCain-Feingold at issue in the original Citizens United case -- banning corporate-paid "electioneering communications" from the airwaves during the weeks before an election -- goes too far toward suppressing legitimate expression.

The time for agnosticism, your faithful blogger responded, should have ended with Valeo or, more precisely, its consequences. I am not talking about the perversion of the 2004 campaign by the "swift boaters" but that is at least an easily digestible example of how a supposed "free speech" question has perverted our system. The health care debate is, however, a better example of a system that is completely and almost frighteningly, broken mainly because of the inability to regulate the way political campaigns are financed.


The additional discourse Ms. Greenhouse's post prompted largely missed the point. First, the issue has nothing to do with whether a corporation is a "person." Moreover, if someone told you that you could not give money to find the campaign of someone you supported it would be easier to understand the relationship between campaign contributions and free speech. But free speech is regulated all the time. You are not allowed, for instance, disclose certain information you receive in confidence, nor libel and slander anyone, you cannot use a religious or not for profit organization to promote a political point of view, and, if yo are a federal employee, you are not allowed to even publicly support a candidate. That is the issue.

And it is one we have known to be the crux of our problem for some time. With apologies to those faithful readers who may have seen many of the same posted here last August, it is worth noting again that it is clear from all that has transpired, that the failure to enact meaningful campaign finance reform will doom us forever to a regime where money---and only money---will win out over all. I am not so naive to believe that there is anyway to prevent those with from getting their views to be considered beyond their value. The issue is whether the rest of us have a chance.

The first president to explain this to us did so in the starkest of terms, in his campaign for re-election in 1936:

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live....These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

Yet here we are, more than a half century later, still unable to find a way to care for our fellow citizens the way every other industrialized nation has, and besieged by opinionmakers whose opinion has been bought and paid for by the precise group we thought we had defeated with the election and re-election of President Roosevelt and now by the election of President Obama.

There is no question about what is happening to us. It was, after all, Senator McCain, before his silence was purchased, who explained it clearly in 1999, when he was running against the symbol of the bought and paid for presidency: a Texas Governor named Bush.

At the time, Senator McCain proposed a health care plan that was not a good one, but something. It depended on the generosity of private entities, of course, since that's what Republicans do. But more important was Senator McCain's connecting his health care proposal to his fight, with Senator Russell Feingold, for campaign finance reform:

Taking the $100,000 special interest checks out of politics is the gateway through which all other reforms including the reform of our health care system must pass...Republicans want to protect the insurance companies from lawsuits. The Democrats want to let the trial lawyers sue anyone for anything.

It was this McCain---the one we thought showed promise of being a Republican who would and could work to solve our nation's problems though from a different perspective--and not the fraud who now goes by the same name who announced his 2000 campaign for the presidency explaining that

To improve our health-care system, we must rein in the power of trial lawyers and the influence of insurance companies.

and who, in a debate among Republican candidates said, in reference to comment by Gary Bauer about an issue his mother had with an H.M.O.

Washington is gridlocked by special interests. Gary, why do you think it is that we couldn't give patients some fundamental rights?...The Republicans are in the grip of the H.M.O.s and the insurance companies and their huge six- and seven-figure donations.

The line about big bad trial lawyers is, again, from the Republican playbook and not to be taken very seriously as anything more than political blather (as anyone who has tried to sue a malpracticing doctor would know). The rest of what he said enraged Republicans and probably redoubled their efforts to elect the Bush whose family came from the insurance industry heaven known as Connecticut.

That same McCain is now left on the Senate floor sputtering (falsely as it turns out) about having

been around here 20-some years. First time I've ever seen a member denied an extra minute or two to finish his remarks. ... I just haven't seen it before myself. And I don't like it. And I think it harms the comity of the Senate not to allow one of our members at least a minute.

Comity of the Senate? (Maybe, comedy of the Senate). What comity is there where the minority party as a bloc routinely votes against anything the majority proposes. Anything. What comity is the Senator referring to where the number of cloture votes has risen to the extent that it is just taken as a given that no bill can pass the Senate without 60 votes. Are you old enough to remember the lament that the Senate was about to lose the collegiality and devotion to the country that made it essentially different from the more political House of Representatives?

It is something which, of course,is long gone. Krugman noted the absence of "adults" during last year's financial crisis but it is a deeper problem than as to just that issue. There are no "wise heads" anymore; the people who can travel between the parties to accomplish an end that is politically difficult but important to the country. It took, for instance, Senator Dirksen delivering many of his minority members to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid 1960s to defeat filibusters by southerners who were then part of the Democratic Party.

That won't happen again until people can run for the House and Senate without the financial support of the parties or outside interests. Until then, most members and candidates will try to reconcile their positions with those of the people who are willing to fund those campaigns. That is why despite a vast majority of our citizens preferring some sort of public health insurance program, we won't have one. Today's joke of an excuse as to why Senator Snowe cannot vote for cloture shows how completely broken our politics have become.

That is not the President's fault, nor Senator Reid's or Rahm Emmanuel's. It is not really even Senator Lieberman's fault or the cloture rules in the Senate. It is our political system. It has to change. And, honestly, if it does not, I fear the consequences.

This is not the time to drop out. This the time to become a wonk. This is the time to start down a long, winding, but difficult to traverse road to change.

And no: this will not be accomplished during this administration, nor necessarily the life of many of us on this planet.

But let us begin.