I will come back to this after I have thought it out for a time.

But one thing I do know, if Obama loses we are going to have a Governor Walker or worse. And the election going on right now in Wisconsin did not come out of the blue.

Independents and union repubs and all sorts of folks went out and voted the dems out of office.

And they found themselves being ruled by satan himself.

Void union contracts.

Cut educational funds.

Cut taxes for the rich.

Cut funds available for the poor.

Cut housing programs.....

I am too angry to finish this right now.

But if Americans really vote Obama out of office, both the Senate and the House will be solid repubs and a national plague shall fall on this country that has not been seen in 80 years!

The first thing is to determine what voters they are going after.  What Obama (and his team) will be seeking to fashion in my opinion is a moderate Democrat-Independent coalition. They will employ the third strategy: Vote for Obama so that he can finish the very important work of [insert very important work].  The difference this time around, and a variation on the "only adult in the room" is that [insert very important work] never got off the ground because of the opposition. 

What will be interesting is that Obama (and his team) will be asking for the voters to send to Congress politicians who are also adults.  During the primary season it will be as much about who the Republicans send to the general election as it is about Obama.  In other words, if you like things like infrastructure banks and taxing the rich, you need to send someone who is willing to at least be open to this idea. 

Obama made a lot of ground in 2008 by talking about changing the way Washington works.  At the time it seemed that there a ground-swell for bipartisanship. Although that seems to have been a bit of mirage.  But I think Obama's message will be - we can't change the way Washington works if you send people to DC who refuse to change the way that they work.  Given the poll numbers after the debt ceiling "debate" there seems to be some energy behind this.  Campaign speeches that focus on digging in one's heels or some variation of that can be immediately targeted as reflective of the debt ceiling debate.

Just a thought.

We live in a crazy world in which ignorance has been redefined as reasonableness, and reason is ignored; extremism is reputed to be common sense and common sense is called extreme.  And Obama has embraced austerity and debt hysteria to such an extent that he now appears boxed into a do-nothing course of action.

But here is a perfectly solid, reasonable agenda that any mainstream Democrat should be willing to embrace and run on:

http://contract.rebuildthedream.com/

Perhaps Obama is now so busy defining himself as standing with the fictional middle that he is unwilling to endorse mainstream, common sense, democratic and Democratic proposals, especially if those proposals are endorsed by that notorious Communist Van Jones.  Or perhaps he is not too far gone.

On the infrastructure bank, we have to be careful.  The infrastructure bank can come in many different varieties, and can be designed in a way such that it becomes just another neoliberal privatization scheme, using public seed money to place more of the essential public goods of our country in the hands of private, democratically unaccountable corporate ownership.  I may be wrong, but I feel there is an untapped longing out here in the world among everyone to the left of the Tea Party for a government that actually does something, and for leadership that fights for sovereign public control over our resources and fundamental national infrastructure, and is not about to start auctioning off the vital assets and economic power nodes of democratic republics to corporate barons.

I'm not interested in any kind of infrastructure program that has me driving to work and paying user fees on the Caterpiller 89 Interstate to see the sights in the Walmart National Forest.   We the people have already handed over too much control to unaccountable private power.  That trend needs to stop now.   Why subsidize Caterpiller to build and own a highway.  Let's build it, own it and run it ourselves.

It's a pity that he continued on in Afghanistan since "I killed Osama bin Laden and ended the war on Al-Qaeda" would have been nice.  Instead he killed Osama bin Laden and we're still fighting the Taliban to no end and to no real purpose.

He did ask Don't Ask Don't Tell and he's gotten us closer to same sex marriage and, of course, your health insurer has to pay for your birth control now.  So good on him for all of that, but it's hardly what wins elections.

He needs a new plan.  But he also needs to hire Paul Krugman to come up with it and he's not going to. Besides, if he did, it wouldn't get anywhere in Congress if he did.  I think he should have resisted the urge to speak in the wake of the S&P downgrade.  Nobody was going to stop that sell off and the line, "We're still a AAA nation," (or whatever he said) only served to validate S&P's judgment by adopting the vocabulary of the very people criticizing the country.

But this has devolved into what you didn't want to see -- a bunch of complaints that you've heard before.  Absent a credible challenger for the Democratic nomination, we're going to need this guy to come up with a winning formula and that means he has to rethink things.  But there are clearly limits, if not to his imagination, then to what he finds acceptable.

Maybe this focus on a transformational presidency served him badly.  Reagan had the moderating effect of the Cold War on him.  No matter what else, he and the other Cold War presidents always had the end of humanity on their shoulders.  It allowed them to rethink things in ways that might seem radical now but that seem common sense when the alternative is global thermonuclear war.  Obama sought to be transformative in a much less fiery, more metaphysical sphere.  And, oddly enough, the stakes of such a debate are both higher and nowhere near high enough to moderate the various players and so his opponents are able to engage in extreme brinksmanship.  Basically, it's very dangerous to be a post partisan in a partisan world.

He won't change because he doesn't understand what has gone wrong, what he has done wrong or what he needs to do differently.

You have described very well why he is unlikely to be re-elected.

I think the primary goal for progressives at this time is to think strategically about ways of using the upcoming election campaign to advance progressive causes, insert more progressive ideas into the national discussion and debate and push the Obama administration in a more progressive direction.

Getting bogged down in premature discussions of October 2012 political pitches seems like both a massive waste of time and a dangerous and completely unnecessary capitulation to establishment and fear-mongering.  Obama is not going anywhere.  There will be plenty of time for people to start the stretch run groveling late next year.

It's important for Democrats not to act continually on the basis of fear.  You can't stand up for the people who need people to stand up for them if you start wetting your pants at the drop of a hat over the bad things that might happen.

Hey, Genghis.  I don't know if anyone else has mentioned it here, but Christie Romer had a great policy suggestion on Bill Maher last week.  She suggested a direct tax incentive to businesses who hire additional workers.  It's not a WPA, but it still amounts to fiscal expansion and puts people back to work.  It also has the bonuses of working through the private sector and, provided that it can be sold as such, masquerading as a tax cut.

You're absolutely right that Obama finds himself in a tough place going into 2012.  And much of that is the result of maneuvers he's made.  The poli sci models I'm familiar with say that this is a Republican election to lose if we get to next June or so in poor economic shape.  Forecasts are not good and without some kind of bold, top-down policy action it doesn't seem like there's much chance of improvement in the near future.

I'll be considering Lynn Vavreck's model as we roll into 2012.  She incorporates the usual economic fundamentals, but also tries to incorporate information about position and messaging and claims that her model is 92% accurate.  Maybe I'll write a summary of her model for Daggers to chew on.