Obama at 470

From Zanecorpwiki

• Health care finally gets through with all problems I wrote about before, but if you read between the lines, the administration's plan seems to be to force everyone to get involved (and care) and then use that to push onto further, real cost reform.
• Finance is finally on the table, and there may be some teeth to it. I have to step back on my earlier analysis on this one and grant that the process pretty much forces you to do "one big thing at a time".
• Still failing on transparency.
• Still failing on human rights.
• What climate problems?
• Republicans want to force immigration as an issue... who knows why as they're setting themselves up as "the big bad racist white party".
• Let's end on a positive note: nuclear arms reduction. The work with the Russians to reduce arms and corral material from the Baltic states is really important stuff and I can only hope momentum continues to gain in this area.

One would think the nuclear stuff is something everyone could get behind, but that underestimates the power of pure politics. Obama caught flak on the issue despite nuclear arms reduction being one of the major planks of the Prophet, Ronald Reagan. I guess Republican isn't so much a religion as a brand and we've entered the "New Coke" era.

It was maybe always a given that you could only have one major piece of legislation going at any one time. It seems silly that the 500+ members of Congress and their armies of staffers and vast support network can only focus on one thing at a time and even then it can take an entire Congressman's term to get a single bill through, but we can't lay that at Obama's feet. If anything, his mistake was in thinking it could be swifter.

The challenge may be that you can only do so many "grand bargains" and everything important big. It's not so much that "times have changed" and issues are getting bigger, but that we have gone so long (Bush I, Clinton, Bush II) without any big adjustments. Every thing's just kinda built up. It certainly didn't help that Bush W. chose to spend his presidency on foreign wars instead of addressing the growing problems of health care, climate, and finance.