It was not a good week to celebrate the first anniversary of President Obama's inauguration. There was, of course, the absurd return to the political thought that the candidate who most seems to be "regular" should get elected and a Supreme Court opinion that makes it all the more harder to change a political system that has become so divorced from its purpose that its very existence could be threatened in ways that are presently somewhat unimaginable.

Yet it was a good first year. The country's direction was slowly changed. We stand, as a nation, for the things that made others admire us. The executive branch is in the hands of competent people, able to respond to many of the crisis which pop up every day. Though we could have done better, the government did what it could do to pull us from the brink of something even worse than what we have faced for over two years. Our goals and intentions for protecting the world from those who seek to do harm to others until they get their way are much clearer today and our response in Haiti has shown us to be the way we have always seen ourselves.

It was not, however, the great year that seemed possible one year ago today. There is blame to go around, but, as discussed below, the system as it exists today is rigged against progress and, under the circumstances, it is grossly unfair to be put a disproportionate share of the blame on the President and his staff.

Shortly before the 2008 election, in a post which appeared here and elsewhere, the euphoria surrounding what seemed to be the likely outcome of the presidential election, it appeared to be necessary to present some

perspective: something DailyKos does not necessarily specialize in, as we near an election that could change everything, or maybe just a few things. It will not be apparent on November 5 which happened, no matter what the bloviators say and there will only be so much that the progressive community can do in the short term to push this they way we want it to be....

As Senator Clinton suggested lo those many months ago, the election of Senator Obama and Democratic majorities in Congress, even a supposedly "veto proof" Senate, will not cause celestial beings to commence singing, and we will not have the sense of liberation that, say, about 30 % of Germany felt when the Berlin Wall fell. We might have some sense of a lesser level "end of an era" but hardly the "end of history" that Fukiyama famously proclaimed in 1991.

But just as a unified Germany did not live up to the promises of nearly 50 years of division, the end of Bush, means very little beyond, well, the end of Bush. The people who elected or managed to get G W Bush the presidency will not have gone away and their vote for Senator Obama, from Christopher Buckley's to Ken Adelman's and, one supposes, David Brooks' is a reflection of that Bush, and of Senator McCain's selection of Sarah Palin. You can keep dreaming, if you would like, but neither Bush, nor Gov Palin will be on any ballot in 2012....

So, yes, thanks, oddly to George W Bush, our time has come. He has made his mark on our country and we owe some thanks to him for showing why more competence and less ideology is necessary in the presidency. But he will not be on any more ballots and will soon become forgotten (though Hoover managed to be a useful word to campaign on as late as 1964).

The point is not to replicate the Roosevelt hundred days. That is ridiculous. The point is to change the country in a way that will command the support of a large majority of the public before the general cynicism about government takes root. It does not mean sending Dick Cheney to prison, though that may be where he belongs. There are more important things at stake.

We failed to achieve that change. Some of that was due to far too much caution and a pollyanish view of what we could expect from the Republican Party, especially its supposed "moderates." Each of those to whom we thought we could turn failed us, failed their country and failed the people they serve, with the exception of Senator Spector, who changed parties, partly under duress.

But if we have failed to learn our historical lessons, They have not and it was foolish to think they would forget the nearly fifty years of wilderness they were forced into following the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the enactment of the New Deal. People who sputter out complaints about what the New Deal did or did not do, cannot avoid this: that except for very brief periods in one or the other house of Congress in the 1950s, both houses had Democratic Party majorities from the minute President Roosevelt took over until the Reagan election of 1980. The reasons are obvious: the government went from some distant, aloof entity generally protecting entrenched interests to a force for change for the benefit of huge majorities of people who responded with their votes, some reflexive long after the emergency that elected FDR was over.

They are not going to allow that to happen again. To allow the President and a Congress even nominally controlled by his party to enact sweeping health care reform that our citizens will treasure and protect they way they have with the social security system established as apart of the New Deal, or medicare, the deferred dream of the Roosevelt administration finally enacted to honor the memory of a murdered President, to present yet another "third rail" of "entitlements" that our citizens will zealously guard to prevent even a Reagan from destroying, is not in the Republican plans.

One has to remember, though, that the New Deal was not caused by a sudden burst of altruism or the will of the patriarch elected in 1932, though both were factors. The responsible core of those "in charge" in 1932 and 1933 were scared: they saw what was happening in Europe in the aftermath of the first world war and the onset of the Great Depression. Russia became the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy and Spain saw the rise of fascist dictatorships and the rest of Europe teetered on the edge of something too big to contain.

The signs were here as well: the America Firsters, the appeal of Huey Long, or Father Coughlin or Gerald L.K. Smith, the bonus army's marches on Washington and Pres Hoover's intemperate response (my only recently learning the identity of the general in charge of that response still has me digesting that nugget), led many to fear that unless the government did something---something---to alleviate the situation faced by so many, the American experiment would be in jeopardy.

We are not at that stage yet. But as Bob Herbert discussed so well this morning , we are headed in that direction. I will watch the three talk shows tomorrow as I usually do, but with only one ear cocked in their direction since there is no question what it will be about: process, horse races, who has the votes, who's up, who's down: what are "the people" saying about "the direction of the country" meaning, not its real "direction" but its political "direction": is it going more Republican or Democratic.

Nobody will be asked about the situations so many Americans are in. Unemployed with few prospects and no health insurance or trapped in a bad job which they need to keep for its health insurance or the crappy health insurance their employer has purchased or is administered by the insurance company against the claims of the ostensibly insured. And if they are asked, they will respond with pablum: we all want (blah, blah, blah).

This is a recipe for disaster as discussed here (among many other places---this was a rescued diary on Daily Kos). A government which does not respond except to those who pay for the privilege will not last forever, but as countless others have found, it is not always changed as peacefully as were the administrations of, say, Herbert Hoover or George W. Bush.

Which, sadly, brings us to the worst political news of the week: the sad culmination of a course we have been on since Buckley v Valeo known as Citizens Union. Yes, as some have suggested, the teeth gnashing over this decision---as it if something suddenly changed our political system which will now be hopelessly corrupted, is almost silly. Your television must have been broken if you did not see the Swift Boat ads destroy Sen Kerry in 2004, and if you have not seen what the rest of us have seen particularly since then, including the day to day commercials warning against the enactment of health care, to believe that McCain-Feingold did not accomplish what it set out to do. Nothing in Citizens Union changes that equation. The 527s and everybody else with money will continue to distort our campaigns with commercials just as they have since, at the very latest, the 1968 election described so well by Joe McGinnis.

That is not why Citizens Union is so bad for our nation. What is so bad is that the Supreme Court has now re-enforced the gross mistake it made in Valeo. It is not that political speech is protected by the First Amendment: of course it is. Nothing is more protected than political speech. If pornographers are allowed to disseminate their stuff under the First Amendment, people are certainly allowed to express their political opinions, even ones with which I disagree.

It is not because the Court has agreed that corporations may engage in free speech, just as living breathing people can. It's a foolish debate: if the corporation cannot speak, can the people who work for it do so? Of course they can.

The mistake in Valeo, now rock solidly the law under this horrible opinion, was the idea that while speech cannot be banned it cannot be curtailed in some way. It defies reason that the people who think the New York Times should be prosecuted for disclosing the government's attempts to circumvent the law, also maintain the view, expressed in Citizens Union that any attempt to regulate the circumstances under which political speech takes place permits the Government to

silenc[e] certain voices at any of the various points in the speech process.

Regulation is not "silencing." One cannot make political speeches from the pulpit of a religious institution immune from taxation, nor can people use government facilities to further particular political candidacies (a laughable prohibition bent into practical insignificance these days in many government offices, but not, generally, in most public schools).

Valeo was wrong when it was decided. The attempts to ameliorate its absurdities were never that effective. I do not mourn the loss of Austin or McConnell. Both put easily removed band-aids on the problem. The commercial which shows John Kerry in black and white, in an unflattering way and calls him a liar is not diminished by the fact that the announcer cannot tell the voter which candidate the commercial is supporting. I remember well the episode of West Wing which showed how easily the rules could be circumvented by "soft money." If, Senator Schumer, you really think, Citizens Union has determined the outcome of the 2010 election in some way beyond what Valeo did long ago, you might want to watch that show.

Are Britain, Canada and Israel, three common law countries, inhibiting "free speech" by limiting the length of time a political campaign can take place? I don't think so, but what's more important is that it is likely that any law which purports to regulate any aspect of the "speech" component of a political campaign in this country, will now be unconstitutional. I am not comfortable with tampering with the First Amendment, as critical a component of our freedom as there is, just read the Pentagon Papers case to see why, but I am not sure there is much of an alternative and, since it is unlikely that the First Amendment will be altered, a despair over our future is unavoidable. That is what is wrong with Citizens United.

Commercials do not scare me. They hurt Sen Kerry, but that's the way it goes. They were baseless and stupid but if our idiotic electorate---people who vote against Attorney General Coakley because she did not know that Curt Schilling is not a Yankee fan, or to teach President Obama a lesson---falls for it, the commercial is not to blame. The electorate is.

What frightens me is that people who can retain their position---their job---only by soliciting money from others: our current system, will always do what those who have the money want them to do. That is not because they are necessarily corrupt. That is too strong a word and too high a burden. Arguing that what this does is corrupt any recipient of campaign funds is to easily rebutted, as witness the Court's opinion as announced by Justice Kennedy, quoting, of all people, Justice Kennedy:

The fact that speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt:

Favoritism and influence are not . . . avoidable in representative politics. It is in the nature of an elected representative to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary, to favor the voters and contributors who support those policies. It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribu-tion to, one candidate over another is that the candi-date will respond by producing those political out comes the supporter favors. Democracy is premisedon responsiveness.

McConnell, 540 U. S., at 297 (opinion of KENNEDY, J.).

Reliance on a

"generic favoritism or influence theory . . . is at odds with standard First Amendment analyses because it is unbounded and susceptible to no limiting principle."

Id., at 296.

The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy. By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.... The fact that a corporation, or any other speaker, is willing to spend money to try to persuade voters presupposes that the people have the ultimate influence over elected officials.This is inconsistent with any suggestion that the elector-ate will refuse

"'to take part in democratic governance'" because of additional political speech made by a corporation or any other speaker.

McConnell, supra, at 144 (quoting Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U. S. 377, 390 (2000)).

What is wrong with it is not its corrupting influence over a particular legislator. It is its overall corruption of the system. There is nothing wrong with giving access to a contributor, so long as non-contributors also have access. Free speech that one has to pay for is not free.

This is why Congress is out of touch. It is not that they are locked into a beltway mentality as much as it is that it is locked into the mentality of those who contribute to political campaigns. As noted here before, there is no better example than the health care debate to show our political system is completely and almost frighteningly broken mainly because of the inability to regulate the way political campaigns are financed.

This: more than Al Qaeda, more than jobs, more than health care, is the most important issue facing the nation. When Sen McCain was sane, he made the point that there is nothing that comes before Congress that is not affected by this problem. That is why we once thought so highly of him.

The future of our country is at stake. This is an issue that almost always makes ones eyes glaze over, but it must be tackled. The failure to do so is dangerous. Really.