From The Regressive Antidote
By David Michael Green

I’ve been having a hard time getting a fix on our new (though no longer quite so) president.

I know my friends on the left will think that’s just because I’m hopelessly naive. Ironically, I expect the good folks on the right (who exist along with that adjective mostly as a theoretical proposition, but you get the idea) would fully agree with this statement, perhaps the only thing in the world the left and right all have in common.

But even that agreement would be short-lived. For the former group, I’d be naive to see Barack Obama as anything but yet another agent of Capital, adding to the fine efforts of Reagan, Clinton and Bush in advancing yet further the interests of the American oligarchy.

For regressives, on the other hand, I’m a fool-and-a-half not to see Obama for the “socialist”, “communist” or even “fascist” (they can’t quite seem to get their ideological slanders straight), that he plainly is.

The folks on the right are insane, of course. But that’s hardly news. They are also increasingly desperate to find anything to hit this guy with. “He gave the Queen an iPod!” He bowed to the Saudi King!” “He went to a play!” Wow. Apart from everything else, I must say I appreciate their willingness to cling so heartily to their own little adventure in political suicide by each week reminding the tens of millions who didn’t get it the first time around why the last eight – if not thirty – years have been so harrowing. Thanks for the public service, guys. The world will certainly be a better place without you!

A lot of the critique from the left is pretty legitimate, I would say, notwithstanding the continuing possibility (or, many would say, total fantasy) that the president is playing three-dimensional chess, while we mere mortals continue to perceive him in the context of our grossly limited Flatland of a mere two. In other words, it remains at least technically possible that Obama is a true progressive, but he’s just strategically far ahead of the rest of us, and therefore realizes that he can actually accomplish a heckuva lot in eight years, but only if he resists the pressure to throw long passes on every down, and instead moves both incrementally and cleverly. Sanity through the back door, you might call it, and god knows the American public isn’t famous for quickly recognizing good ideas when they see them.

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