"Changing politics" is not the change America craves. Changing GOVERNANCE and adoption of bold progressive policies is the change America craves.

Obama sees himself as the transformational figure who will lead the Democratic Party (or at least, major factions thereof) out of the wilderness.

What wilderness would that be? The wilderness of their longstanding attachment to the idea that government can solve problems.

At heart, Obama is much more comfortable with the idea that "government is the problem, not the solution".

He's bright enough not to repeat Reagan's errors step for step ... but if the next Mr. Laffer approaches him with the next cocktail napkin theory of minimalist action, he's all in.

Obama is a thinker.  He is a student.  He watches and he waits to see where the herd is going and then he runs to the head of it and acts as if he was there the whole time.  If the herd splits and goes in different directions, he is paralyzed until he figures out which group is larger.

He may be at the head of the pack, but he isn't so much leading the pack as he is managing the symbiotic relationship between the herd and himself that keeps him there.

So, forget the bold agenda with Obama in the WH - that isn't who Obama is; bold is too risky for someone who has as much need to be loved as he does.

He did not come to the race as a bold initiator of change - you can't find it in his votes - and his sloughing off of Senate assignments and his glomming onto others' accomplishments are not the traits of someone who is going to lead us into the light.  They are the traits of someone who is bored by the grunt work, who fades when the spotlights are off and the applause dies.  He will need constant cheering on to stay on task, and while there seems to be no shortage of sycophants on tap to keep the dream alive, keeping Obama propped up is going to make for terrible governance.

The issues about revenue to pay for infrastructure (raised in above comments) is real, but adding to deficit spending isn't the only way to pay besides raising tazes on the wealthy a la Bill Clinton levels.

Infrastructure jobs usually pay union wages to skilled (but not college-educated) workers...roads, bridges, school construction, dams, etc.)  Those people pay taxes when employed!  That is revenue.

In manufacturing, there will be increased investment in replacing all that military equipment destroyed or left in Iraq after withdrawal...'rebuilding the military.'  That will sell to the American people...mostly...for everyone knows it has to happen.  Post-partisan investment, bigtime.  But it must wear a 'made in America' label!  No exporting that stuff as they are doing now...talk about endangering our security.

Talk about THAT, Obama.

Obama has had a crappy month.  The trip abroad was good but McCain has spent the past two weeks souring it.  And now Obama's on vacation.

No tying McCain to Bush or saying anything at all about the last 8 years.  Just blanket the airwaves with a positive health care message.  That would set the stage for it legislatively after he is elected.  It would also be a change to how politics are usually conducted.

And then another ad about voting rights. And one about restoring the Constitution.

It seems like they are afraid to run issues ads.  The only positive ads they run are the Obama personality ads.  I'd like to see less about the candidate and more about the issues.  Sell the public on the issues first.

Probably even stronger without it.

People want to call the job creation and people raised out of poverty in the 90s "incrementalism", oh well, but it only makes sense to me if one merely keeps an issue activist scorecard and doesn't measure real impact on society.

I can quite easily imagine Obama having a better issue activist scorecard at the end of his admin, but having less of a positive impact on society.

I guess were gonna see what happens.

Thus the question:  could Obama possibly campaign successfully on a platform that included the virtual certainty of tax increases?

I doubt it.  He's demonized already as the classic "tax and spend liberal".  Any allusion to a New deal-type initiative would expose him to far more probing questions specifically addressing funding models.  Ending the war certainly would be helpful, but the large scale infrastructural efforts referenced carry huge price tags, far in excess of the aggregate savings realized by a troop pullout.

As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances.

So, when I read this post and see that people do support all these bold initiatives, I am not as encouraged as I should be.  I do not have faith that American's can tie the candidate and his "issues" with their general sense that something needs to be done.  They don't understand that politics is there to fix the things they don't like.  In the Hayes piece, he writes,

I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief--not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue.

Whichever candidate wins (and I believe it will be Obama) will be faced with a financial crisis that dwarfed the mess Bill Clinton inherited in 1993. I suspect that it will require sacrifice in the form of both tax increases and either spending cuts/spending freezes. We simply can't afford to continue to print money and expect it to be worth anything. We need a strong dollar to offset inflation and to encourage re-investment in our country.

Un-doing the damages will burn up time & energy.

A lot of what can be done will depend on what the Congress looks like in January, and exactly which awful messes will have to be cleared up on a priority basis, since we have a large selection and a lot of them are not particulary NEW DEAL. We're gonna have to set priorities on those, that is, this one first and this one next and this one after that, and to be prepared to discover whole worlds of problems which were kept secret. No matter how awful what we find is.

It will be hard to get anything through unless there are at least sixty-one D senators, because the discipline of the Republican party to have forty one who will talk anything to death is so good. This had made the majority needed to pass anything in the Senate 61, not 51. 68 if you have to beat down rivers of amendments. That is so because of Republican discipline and the willingness they have to put ideology before their constituents, and distract from what they are doing with slogans. We can criticize it but criticism won't change it. And they are true believers who really do believe their economic theory is more important than all the people in the country, and we can't talk them out of it. It's a fact of life. we gotta have more Ds.

Part of what will have to be done is to repair the now mostly gone safety net, which was the New Deal gift. Figure out how to reduce the deficit, by getting corporations actually to pay taxes (the report out yesterday from the Government accountability office is that most corporations . . . pay no taxes at all, so its on the very small business and the individual taxpayers) AMT just for corporations above a certain size, maybe? Stop the raids on Social Security and increase both the payroll cap and the categories of income which can be taxed --if you get it in exchange for labor, it should be FICA taxable, not like those hedge funders who call it capital gains because they get it in stock and other securities. Tighten up seriously the SEC so the free-market driven strange instruments which are killing the markets and which were all outside the SEC rules and for which bailouts are being demanded, are now inside the rules and disciplined. tighten up bank and other financial institution rules so we won't be seening banks going down because of a part of their business which is not regulated by the SEC or Fed or whoever is killing them, as it is now. We are being killed now by the overuse of dubious financial instruments which were beyond any regulatory jurisdiction, and where the much tooted free market regulation . . . didn't. this will take a lot of noise and negotiation, but you can't get there if you don't start. Just keep saying Bear Stearns, Bear Stearns.

Amend the bankruptcy code so debtors can discuss their principal residence mortgages and credit cards there - a lot of those few which do get examined produce relief for debtors on already well known legal principles, and will have a salutary effect on lending practices for it, also a good thing. And individual consideration will require the institutions to demonstrate their bona fides in the lending, if there were any.

On Health, See exactly how Mass is doing with UHC, and what is to be learned from that to make it work well enough to make it national - insurance is not ideology, it is practice, and private insurance with its tendency to exclude this condition or that customer entirely, cap the amount which may be paid for medicine or procedures when the free market makes them cost more than that,  and the larger overhead over against Medicare and its ilk are practical problems, which private enterprise and the free market have had the chance to solve and have failed. Do the numbers to demonstrate how the cost of single payer or Universal will affect individuals and businesses--that may or may not demonstrate that when the risk is spread differently the costs to businesses and individuals and families change in ways we couldn't see  until we looked.  

On Education, change No Child so that children who are going to affect the numbers are not shuttled off to Special Ed to take them out of the scored test pool. Stop fussing and teach bilingual students to speak and read and write English, early on and consistently. Use after school programs for that if must be, but do it. Provide adult reading, writing and speaking programs.

On jobs forbid using independent contractor status for long term workers or standing jobs which will be there for the long haul. So that if the boss gets benefits, so do the ones doing the work in his or her office or business.  

On the environment, some states are doing interesting things already which can be examined for efficaciousness, and those encouraged by credits of some kind when they do work. Reinstate the credits for alternative energies and reduce those for oil. Reinstate the difference in futures regulation for hedgers who are doing it because they intend to use the oil, and investors, who aren't and have more stringent rules for investors. Don't give oil leases to anybody who has one and has not done its best to exploit it already- they are given to be used, now, not banked against production some day in the future when the profit is higher.

Get rid of the government by executive order regime, and get those executive orders disclosed and changed or eliminated. Pass provisions that make executive signing statements invalid or at least not binding in favor of any President other than the one who signed them. Clarify the issue so that a foreign state cannot make a deal with the executive which does not go through the Senate. Clarify and narrow what is a national security issue. Reinstitute regular criminal treatment of criminals and terrorists alike - it works. Eliminate detention without limit for the unconvicted.

Change incentive industrial programs so that incentives go to the Rust Belt and other places where industry has vanished, not to the states of well connected politicians, or right to work states where businesses go because they can pay less, always. this may take national rules on right to work, because of the large number of galloping industries and of desperate states who will do ANYthing to get this plant or that factory, including making them tax free. Put in serious incentives for newly developed energy sources, non-corn ethanol additives, and the engineering and development for fuel efficient vehicles, to replace the dying auto industry and all of its suppliers. Undo the bush administration's denial of the California waiver on air quality, and allow other states to adopt it. Eliminate the 1872 mining statute which allows private comapnies to mine without cost on public land, or land that used to be public.

Paying for it is a problem. Useless wars and ridiculous private contracting by the Pentagon has got to stop, now. Reinstitute the paygo program seriously, and find an institutional way, perhaps a quota per seat, of pork and porklike programs. Prohibit any congressperson who has taken money from lobbyists from voting on what the lobbyists asked for - a toughie but worth it even if we only get half or a part in round one.

Can this be done. Don't know, but if you don't do the prep, it will not happen, whether it could have or not.  
These are finite tasks which require data to back them up so that rs can't fall back again and again on ideology unsupported by reality. This means a very busy Congress and one where we can't write off the Blue Dogs and others who might work with us on this, but not on that.  And if it is pitched correctly as things which will directly benefit the constituents who vote, it will be easier to get people working on it.

I am not terribly interested if somebody thinks the candidate will take too middle a road on this one or that one. I am interested in setting a specific shopping list of  specific things which must get done and a candidate who formulates an executable plan to get them done. this is a first list, and some notions on how to do it. This is not a personlity issue between you know who and you know who else. It's a work order.

Edgar08

flashman

Truth Sayer.