Yes, we all had such high hopes coming out of the election two years ago. Some cautioned that we had not really turned a corner; that the successful election of a real Democratic president, for the first time since the election of 1964 was the result of the Republican Party's self-destruction by their nomination and election of a President whose incompetence was so gross, and whose ability to paper over those shortcomings were not even close to that of the Great Reagan, and not because "the people" had seen the light.

But we are a nation of self-delusional fools as discussed so many times under this name that one is hesitant to keep posting the same thing. Yet, more than half the population hardly understands the derivation of the term "broken record" so sounding like one is probably not so bad. Those of you expecting a new progressive era---and the punishment of those who have transformed our nation into a fearful sheep easily led to their slaughter--have much more work to do before we get to that promised land.

Because, my friends, we are losing, and we are losing big. If we do not band together and stop fighting among ourselves, lamenting President Obama's inability to magically transform the landscape, we will be lost forever.

We have, after all, elected the very best President we have had since President Johnson was forced to slink out of office by our division of the war in Vietnam, and Nixon's success in scaring the nation and promising to undue the forces which were transforming our nation in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

But a President can only do so much. He can lead us and lead he has. As discussed here, but precious few other places, he has given two breathtakingly important speeches in the past month or so, both practically ignored ny the noisemaker press and cable tv, And last night, to Politico of all things, he nailed it again:

I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.

But our blow dried hairdos, including the beautiful and vapid counterpoint to the intolerable Mourning Joe's GOP Talking Points of the Day Show, keep tsk, tasking about how the President has failed to live up to his promise. Yes, the President uses the first person too much, and talks too much about "my administration" but his message is not significantly different from the marching orders we were given so many years ago:

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course.

Instead, it is always "them." What are "they" doing in the gulf? How did "they" let BP get away with this? Why did they let Wall Street do this to us?

One of the bosses, in the public service in which your blogger has spent his life, once explained the task ahead of us in one difficult moment by saying that when people ask that "they" fix the problem, those of us required to actually do it are the "they" and cannot blame any other "they" if the problem is not solved.

And in a life in government, we have seen plenty of people who do not or cannot do their job, and who just pretend to during the few hours they show up and then collect their paycheck. The vast majority---the overwhelming vast majority---of teachers, police officers, clerks, and officials of all sorts give so much more than what they are paid to do that the view of government as a lazy behemoth unable to get anything done right is nothing short of astounding, especially when heard from the mouths of those riding the highways government built, and putting their garabage out for the government to collect.

But, and here's that broken record again, we are today the captive of a a poorly educated electorate easily swayed by slogans and expressions of fear and nonsense repeated over and over.

The Great Reagan's greatest achievement for his cause (aided and abetted by his predecessor's parody of what a Democratic administration is supposed to represent) was to build into the American political culture that government is not the answer to our problems; it is the problem.

And, riven by the dissension created by the Vietnam War, nobody on "our side" rose to the defense of the New Deal, and its successors: the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society. Nobody explained the need for regulation, the reasons the government and only the government can and must protect us from so many things including abject poverty when we can't find work, and sickness, when we need medical care which we cannot afford.

Instead, we said we were sorry for what we achieved, and would seek to do no more. The era of "big government" is over. We doomed ourselves then to the point that, as Rachel Maddow so perfectly explained last week, the entire political establishment can rouse itself to fever pitch over a few pennies dispensed to Acorn, but finds that calling BP names while giving them what they want and massive government work is the way to "punish" an oil company which does what it can to avoid the limited government supervision of their activities.

These things do not happen simply because our leaders have failed. They happen because the electorate buys this garbage. They are not secretly on our side waiting for us to lead. They get their social security checks and rail against the government, which they see as the problem not the answer.

We cannot undo the harm caused by over forty years of an incessant drumbeat. Many of us were not born when President Roosevelt led us to battle, but others, who were not born when another president, the most evil we have ever had, turned the nation against progress, do not seem to understand how steep the road is before we can get back on the path we set out to travel in 1933.

Here is the evil president, telling a "silent majority" that the rest of us are trying to humiliate our country. Here is his mouthpiece, the even more evil, and fortunately, caught and convicted, Vice President, in a laughable, if not sadly persuasive attack on progressivism.

We were certain then that ideas would win over this nonsense, but we were wrong. We thought we were entering an age of Aquarius, but we did not. We are amidst a surly group barely tolerant of our existence, but if simply talk to ourselves it doesn't seem all that bad.

A nation founded by immigrants, and built by immigrants, is obsessed today without ridding ourselves of immigrants. Ah, another subject for another day, but the point is this: we are losing and on the verge of losing even bigger. We can argue among ourselves about who is the most progressive, or who to blame for the backward state of our political discourse or we can follow the lead of the greatest of our presidents and acknowledge

our interdependence on each other: that we cannot merely take, but we must give as well, that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good.