The mask came off when Obama chose Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, a former investment banker and recruiter of Republicans to run as Democrats in the 2006 elections.  The icing on the cake was Obama's choice of Rubinite Wall Street protectors and supporters for his economic team with nary a prescient, on target, progressive economist among them.

It's disappointing and disgusting that real Democrats have to push, cajole, etc. a Democratic president to work for the common good, which, unlike the Republicans, is a basic Democratic and democratic principle.   Where the hell are this supposed Democrat's D/democratic convictions when he must be forced or threatened to do that for which he campaigned and was elected by the majority of regular American voters including the Democratic base?  And which he hasn't even effectively begun yet. 

Yes, Obama imitated FDR by saying "Make me do it." but it is a sad state of affairs when a young, 21st century Democratic president is less "Democratic" than the party standard bearer of 76 years ago.  Why isn't Obama a real Democratic "self-starter" president who understands what the "D" represents and is willing to stay the course and fight to the finish and win for the common good in the US.  Instead his current mantra is apparently "But I didn't promise to keep my promises" and we keep seeing a Wussacrat with a golden glottis, a la Reagan, more and more often maintaining Bush policies.

Jeremy Cohen at Truthout writes: " Never has so much passion been so misdirected. If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way to get it was to make that THE demand. Especially of a president whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the right wing.

"Sure, Obama was a community organizer once. That was decades ago when Russia was still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan.

"For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician - and a consummate compromiser at that. Have we failed to notice?

"Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance ... enhanced Medicare for All. In other words, a cost-effective, single-payer system of publicly financed, privately delivered health care that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).

"Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Senator Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate health care patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option - to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.

"To win serous reforms, we need activist leaders who are tough-minded progressives making maximum demands for reforms that truly address our nation's problems. Leave the inside-the-Beltway deal-making to the politicians, properly frightened and moved by the roar of mass movements.

"We need activist leaders who have a clearer idea of who Obama is. He's not one of us. He's one of them - a politician bent on placating corporate interests. We knew all we needed to know about his current world view from all the corporatists he put in top jobs. And from the fact that he felt the need - six weeks into his administration, after the middle-class bailed out Wall Street - to call up The New York Times and assure the world that his policies were NOT socialist but were "entirely consistent with free market principles." At a time the corporate greedsters and free-market ideologues had been exposed as having threatened the economic well-being of the world, they weren't the ones on the defensive. They weren't doing the apologizing. Obama was on the defensive; he was apologizing to them!

"When Democratic leaders start borrowing right-wing rhetoric, we know our activism has not been strong or progressive enough. At the AARP town hall on Tuesday, Obama described a public option as "controversial, I understand people are worried about that." He went on to assure his audience that "nobody is talking about ... government-run health care" or "a Canadian-style plan." At one point, he further assured seniors that no "bureaucratic law in Washington" would interfere in their health care decisions - seeming to adopt the faux populism of anti-government rightists. Yet, he seems incapable of anti-corporate populism, even with despised industries like Wall Street and health insurance.

"I have huge respect for the smart young activists who built up the netroots, unleashing all sorts of progressive possibilities for our country. But I'm bothered by their often ineffectual, Beltway-originated, halfway demands.

"I became active during the Vietnam War. We might still have troops in Vietnam if - instead of militantly demanding "All Troops Home Now" - we'd organized behind polite Beltway initiatives like: "Let's begin negotiations" or "Let's set a timeline for phased withdrawal."

"I fear that netroots leaders are doing the same dance with Obama today that they did with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in 2007 to 2008. Instead of demanding that Democrats in Congress bring our troops home by using the power of the purse to defund the war, netroots leaders rallied behind weak, nonbinding timelines and other halfway measures cooked up with Congressional leaders.

"Great social reforms have occurred in our country not when social movements took their lead from what the White House deemed possible, but when the White House was pushed by powerful movements demanding reforms bolder than what the president was comfortable with. Leading abolitionists pushed Lincoln toward ending slavery by demanding immediate abolition. Socialists' and workers' movements in the '30s sufficiently scared elites so that FDR could pass New Deal reforms far short of socialism. Martin Luther King and civil rights activists continuously pushed and prodded JFK and later LBJ.

"Because, in this period of crisis and fear, unless a progressively-prodded White House delivers reforms that actually improve lives soon, right-wing reaction could rebound more dangerous than ever in 2010 and/or 2012."