I had drinks and dinner at Church in the Fenway with my friend Michael Sunday night and we got to talking about the epic cowardice and hypocrisy of the age, as you do over drinks, and the topic finally dead-ended in a declaration of disgust in Obama, as it does these days.


I am sometimes surprised, myself, at the gorge rising.  I did not feel I was taken in by that hopey changey stuff during the Obama campaign, partly because it was more or less an instant replay of Deval Patrick's gubernatorial campaign here in Massachusetts (to the point where Obama lifted not only slogans but speeches from Patrick, as you'll no doubt recall). 

But say what you will, Patrick has had the courage of his convictions.  The same simply can't be said at this point of Barack Obama.  He has caved to the GOP again and again on issues that are not only no-brainers but are unpopular with a clear majority — of not just his constituents, but the electorate as a whole. 

There are still those who hold out some hope that there's a brilliant behind-the-scenes strategy, and a chorus of die-hards whose mantra has become "but it's not his fault!" But what we are watching here is precisely a failure of leadership.  Mr. Obama is not fighting the good fight.  He's caving in.

The cognitive dissonance comes from our having accomplished as a nation something extraordinary (if inevitable) in electing someone other than a white protestant to the highest office in the land.  That was a monumental milestone in our history, and we are right to celebrate it.  But it makes it all the harder to acknowledge that while it was an extraordinary thing we were able to do in '08, the man we thrust into office: not so extraordinary himself.

The system is broken.  I get that.  The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United made matters worse.   What we are looking at here, sympathetic pundits tell us, are necessary compromises brought on by the Democrats' "shellacking" in the midterms and the prospects of a monumental defeat in 2012.

But these are the wrong compromises that cut at the very heart of the values those of us who voted for Obama hold dearest.  If the President makes them, we may just as well have a Republican in office.  What this President, who ran on Hope and Change, is asking of us is utterly cynical. 

So back at Church, just as my umbrage was reaching its apogee, a big group of twentysomethings of every description came hustling in from the cold and sat at a nearby table.  Michael, who is thirty years my senior (almost to the day), said he worried most about them, the twentysomethings who turned out in record numbers for Obama in '08.  The rest of us are old enough to know better, but for them this was a powerful rebuke of the politics of Hope, from the very man who had introduced them to the possibility to begin with.

I dunno.  There are a lot of lessons you could take away from this cautionary tale.  I see it as a political version of The Descent.  We are in a deep, dark hole.  The Republicans are the blind albino vampire bat people, and the rest of us are just trying to find a way out.  Obama's torch is out of batteries, and the GOP's moving in. 

But you can't negotiate with blind albino vampire bat people, dude.  They live down there.  They don't want to get out.  They're out for one thing: blood.