A panel moderator, not a leader.  A corporatist not a populist. . A DINO not a true Democrat.  Burying the legacy of the New Deal and demeaning its history.  Not a fighter, nor a strong negotiator, but a capitulator.  No wisdom, vision, or courage.  An extreme disappointment to those who believe in the common good.  Guess who?

Paul Krugman recently wrote the following titled, "The Great Abdication."

"Andrew Leonard is right: the Obama budget isn’t going to happen, so in a sense it’s irrelevant. But it still has symbolic meaning. What is Obama saying here?

"The important thing, I think, is that he has effectively given up on the idea that the government can do anything to create jobs in a depressed economy. In effect, although without saying so explicitly, the Obama administration has accepted the Republican claim that stimulus failed, and should never be tried again.  [Bold added]   

My note:  President Obama had the misplaced audacity or an incredibly doltish moment last summer when he declared: "Now, government can't create jobs......."  Say what!!!!    As I wrote then:  Duh! How about Civil Service jobs and other government jobs?   How about the WPA, etc. during the New Deal?

So, he didn't give up what he really never believed in: government creating jobs.  But he sure believed in government bailing out the thieves on Wall Street who unleashed economic disaster with their crimes, where they're flying high today thanks to trillions of dollars in government welfare.

"What’s extraordinary about all this is that stimulus can’t have failed, because it never happened. Once you take state and local cutbacks into account, there was no surge of government spending. Here’s total (all levels) government spending over the past 10 years:

"Looking at this graph, if you didn’t know there had been a “massive” stimulus, would you even have suspected that there had been any stimulus at all?

"And yet the failure of the stimulus that never happened has become conventional wisdom — which is what I feared would happen, two years ago, when I was tearing my hair out over the inadequacy of the original plan.

"Yes, I know, it’s argued that Obama couldn’t have gotten anything more. I don’t really want to revisit all of that; my point here is simply that everyone is drawing the wrong lesson. Fiscal policy didn’t fail; it wasn’t tried."

Perhaps the best reason why that disappointment and "tearing one's hair out" continues and grows was proposed by Garry Wills who once wrote: "Obama's strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation.  Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril."