It’s never too early

With only 47 months to go until the November 2012 election, Barack Obama is kicking ass in the polls. Having not elected to waste his precious bodily fluids political capital to help Jim Martin in his quixotic quest to defeat the all powerful Saxby Chambliss in the Georgia Senate race, he instead is scouring an old rolodex he found while touring the White House recently to find members of the Clinton Administration that he hasn’t already appointed.
Let me make this clear, folks: Barack is a conventional politician who happens to have had a Black father (a rather kickass Black father with a Harvard Ph.D. who was a high government official in Kenya; though the campaign of course focused on his White family– just as in the horrors of Mumbai, recently, the press here focused on the five Americans and handful of other Western victims which of course is the main reason why terrorists target Americans and Westerners in these horrors– but I digress). Barack is demonstrating, as he did with his choice of Biden for veep– that he makes safe, conventional choices of experienced, competent people. Indeed, so competent, that with the exception of All-Drama Hillary Clinton, they are boring. Similarly, he has backed off at least two tax proposals, previously, increasing the income tax on earners over a quarter million dollars, and now, the “windfall profits tax” on oil companies amidst the oil price collapse. Why? Conventional politician.
In short, like FDR (our last president with a Columbia-Harvard educational pedigree) Obama is facing an economic debacle of his predecessor’s making.
But like FDR, what we have to realize is that Obama is a conventional, small-c conservative, meaning cautious and “prudent” politician. He will do the amazing progressive things we demand of him only if, like our ancestors, made FDR, we make him. Al Giordano reminds us that it is up to us to organize, using Obama’s very model of community organization, to demand that change be more than a catchy and successful electoral slogan, but that it actually stand for meaningful progressive reform that the country so desperately needs– and, if we’re right, desperately wants.
It’s never too early… and it’s never too late.