Much as people would like something different, Obama is not one for juicy and dramatic confrontations, and by refusing to engage in them he is essentially taking off the table the big loss or the big win. For many this is not emotionally satisfying, but what makes for emotional reward does not necessarily result in good policy.

The entire comment really was liberating to read, particularly the section that I’ve copied in this comment.
Thanks, Sara.

Helpful reminders.

I totally sympathize with your frustrations, bmaz.

In some respects, as I review my 2009 items, what is coming clear to me is that – call me naive, and call me clueless and call me dumb – it has been a year of revealing in a brazen, harsh, blinding light the pathetic, outworn, tragic nature of the GOP.

And I say that as someone who, out of frustration with the inept, corporatist Dems, began to support the GOP (even giving money and holding a fundraiser for a candidate or two, out of sheer despair at the fecklessness of the Dems by the late 1990s).

I think that some of us got fed up with the Dems and gave the GOP a shot.
Clearly, that did not work.
So Howard Dean gave some of us enough hope to come back to the Democratic party again, because he talked like someone who understood what he was saying and didn’t give a shit about K-Street, the DNC bullshitters, and the style of politics that basically equates votes with financial transactions.

Politics is a deeply human endeavor, but until Howard Dean came along it seemed that politics had become crushed by the ‘transactional logic’ of the ‘marketplace’.

And it was covered in the media as if it were a football game; one team ‘wins’, and moves toward the playoffs. There are rules, there are strategies, there are players. But playing football – much as I love it – doesn’t change the fundamental nature of society or culture. It doesn’t put judges in place, it doesn’t limit the brazenness of banksters….

As long as ‘politics’ is covered in the media — and Tweety is among the worst in this regard (!!) — as if it is ‘mostly about strategy’, as if no one is ever changed or transformed by the political system in which they live, then we’re stuck and suffocating.
And one symptom is judgeships that aren’t approved in a timely fashion.

What you write about is, in my mind, a symptom.

I’m trying to look at the larger, more systemic issues.
And IMVHO, those systemic issues are shaped by outdated institutional rules, a culture that wants to continue worshipping a fiction called ‘the free market’, and cultural attitudes that strangle political conduct because they see it as a ‘competition’ rather than a deeply human endeavor.

The one thing that Howard Dean ‘gets’ better than anyone that I have ever seen is the fundamental, deeply human fact that at its best, politics is deeply transformative.

2009 has shown us what we are up against; people who have no experience, and no clue, of politics as anything other than a financial transaction.

That’s what we’re caught in, and the blocked judgeships are symptomatic of corrupted, cynical, dysfunctional assumptions about what politics is, and what it can accomplish.

We need a Velvet Revolution of some kind, but I don’t think we’ll get it if we continue to buy into Rahm Emmanuel’s view of politics as simply a market transaction or exchange.

When FDR got the Federal Bureau of Reclamation through, it fundamentally changed not only the idea of ‘politics’, but it altered people’s ideas about what was possible, about what they could achieve, and about who they were. FDR, like Howard Dean, ‘got’ politics in a profoundly human way.

What troubles me about the court is not whether they are ‘left’, or ‘right’ – but whether they think very carefully about what it means to be human. Some, like Alito, seem to have a very small, rule-riddled, almost superstitious view of human life; others, like Ginsberg, have a wider experience of life, and a larger view of what it means to be human.

As for Roberts; I wonder if the man would look at a Picasso and find it boring.
Does he ever wonder what Picasso was trying to convey about Guernica?
Because if he doesn’t, that is seriously scary.
And that thought terrifies me.

Sotomayor, however, would probably look at a Picasso and think, ‘what does this mean? what is this terrifying warning encrypted here with paint?’

Your background in brain anatomy should at least allow my claims that asking about ‘issues’ is perhaps not the best way to assess someone’s ability to make complex decisions. There is more art to judgment than we often admit.

For me, it’s not as much about ‘left’ or ‘right’ as it is about whether we have as judges people who ever take the time to consider why we are not chimps, and how the rules we live by restrict us to being merely serfs, or give us the potential to be composers, painters, teachers, researchers, or … whatever.

“a culture that wants to continue worshipping a fiction called ‘the free market’

Fiction it is. The market is totally rigged for the benefit of just a few. Those few share just enough crumbs with the political whores to keep the system fully rigged.

Such a system never has ended well in the past. I dread what is in store for all of us.”

One of the great contributions of the Germans in the Wake of World War II was invention and use of the concept, “SOCIAL MARKET ECONOMY” — I think it comes from Adenauer in the wake of the economic fast growth in the 1950’s — but Willy Brandt adopted the slogan too, and it has long since passed into general use in European Social Democratic writing and analysis. The idea is utterly simple — you just have to add or subtract social costs from any policy you promote or advocate.

I’ll give you an example of this. Every once in a while I decide to follow a political debate about some relatively obscure issue in the Danish Parliament — and back in the early 80’s, I picked up on a good illustration of this. Essentially it was about whether the Menus in the Danish School Lunch Program should be revised to account for recent research on childhood nutrition and its relationship to late middle age and old age disease. In otherwords, how much disease and medical costs can we avoid if we re-jigger what school children are fed? (Remember Denmark has had a National Health Program supported only by a progressive tax since the 1920’s — and this accounts for all sorts of different assumptions.) For the Danes this was really an economic and value matter, because many of the revisions went against the typical Danish diet — heavy in butter, cream, lard, fat pork, cheese, and low in fruit and vegetables. To say the least, the Danish Dairy Industry didn’t like the new menu proposals. But what you got was the fascinating picture of members of Parliament actually reading some of the nutrition science, and then running the figures — how much does a heart attack cost US if it comes when someone is say mid-50’s in loss of production, medical costs, etc, and then a “social cost” of loss of life’s enjoyment. All this was set against the costs of making the menu changes, and putting on a public relations effort to make eating fruit and veggies instead of cheese open face sandwiches for lunch, suddenly seem Super Patriotic Danish.

You just see the concept, “Social Market Economy” painted all over this kind of political debate. I wish we could import the concept and some of the ways of factoring into American debate and Rhetoric. But think about it — in all this debate about Health Care did you hear anyone discuss a subject that involved making some sort of change now so that disease and economic consequences of disease twenty-forty years hence could be avoided? Hell no. Our political culture is such that our congress critters don’t think beyond the next election. (they not unlike the Wall Street Critters who have no long view of investment value, but only think in terms of the next distribution of bonuses.) In fact, Bush/Cheney went to war without a calculation of the long term costs of VA Medical Benefits, and to make matters worse, they cut the budget of the VA at the same time they went to war. Result of such short term thinking — well the scandal at Walter Reed to begin with, and then the Harvard calculations of future costs which befuddled the congresscritters.

Somehow we need to import into our culture that Social Market Economy idea — but it would be OK if we call it something else.

they are going to come whining to the Progressives come next summer and I seriously do not think it is going to work. In our area Con Zack Space came running to the Athens area for money and free workers. I just do not see it. He has pissed off quite a few folks in our region who put lots of time in for him.

Our Congressman Charlie Wilson (D) who rode in on the coat tails of our former Congressman Strickland now Governor is going to find himself in trouble.

Not just the fabric of your country, either.

The bottom line is the torture regime. The economy as well, yes, and internationally, but the torture regime above all, the backsliding of so many in the West on one of the most basic moral issues.

Camus called suicide the most serious philosophical question, and I dunno, Camus was smarter than I am, but I think that suicide comes second to torture as a challenge to sheer sanity. It has horrified and depressed me to live through this decade, to see us all lose the legal and moral structures that were so carefully constructed (often by wise Americans) after the Second World War. Obama is an ignorant child in those woods, as, admittedly, most of the politicians I can think of anywhere are.

I don’t know the answer to this problem, but I doubt it lies with any of the those now living off the avails of public pomp and circumstance. There are many wise and talented people among us who never get elected to anything but whose voices should be leading us in defence of democratic principles and structures and humane international systems. How do we convince large numbers to turn their eyes and ears to those people rather than the Disney constructs who have the titles?

Christy sure stayed on this issue and kept us doing what we can