American political realities

I found this in an article about Obama's sinking poll numbers. This editorial by Professor Drew Western, entitled "What Happened to Obama?", nails it on the head I think.

The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his [Obama’s] deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc, and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation…

Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. [This was] a failure…as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it…

The real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit.

I'm not sure when things in the United States are going to change. One of my closest friends expects a revolution any time. My brother figures things will just hang rightward forever, with some blips of liberal shifts, just like it always has been; hold on to slavery until the last minute, hold black people down until it just boils over. Don't really fix any real financial issues until you're completely screwed. Nobody knows, and real, palpable shifts are happening in the world. But right wings are also strengthening, so right now it's between the current state of centrist Reagan wannabe Barack Obama and some crazy Rick Perry or inadequate Mitt Romney. Or some other state, between some kind of fucked up revolution counter revolution scenario, and anything not so great in between.