**taptaptaptaptap** Is this thing on? Anyone there?

This blog has seen its ups and downs since October of 2003 debut. It went from approximately no readers in the first year to right around a million readers over the course of 2005, after it became the first blog to field its own semi-regular White House correspondent, the inestimable Eric Brewer, who asked some of the best and toughest questions in the press room during a time when the institutional press routinely laid down.

Despite some fairly severe challenges during the course of the past six years—several rounds of homelessness, bouts of incapacitating depression, physical illnesses and the like—I’ve always managed to keep the content coming, sometimes on my own and sometimes with the help of several talented contributors in addition to Eric.

During the past year, though, the blog has been largely moribund. Eric moved on to write for an organization that actually paid him. I hit the wall following last year’s election, and the contributors drifted away in the face of my unavailability.

Curiously, it wasn’t really the homelessness and depression that did me in; I’ve dealt with those before. The straw was the negative reactions in comments and in some vitriolic emails to my suggestions that Barack Obama was 1) comparable to Dick Nixon on domestic issues, and 2) set to preside over the greatest mass disillusionment since the Kennedy and King assasinations transformed tens of millions of hopeful and idealistic baby boomers into disinterested (and often uninteresting) cynics. (Who could have guessed at the time that Lyndon Johnson—Lyndon Johnson!—would prove to be the last great liberal Democrat for at least 50 years and, after Obama is done demolishing the party brand, for perhaps another decade or two beyond?)

Time heals, sometimes. I’m under my own roof, eating home-cooked meals instead of the high-fat, high starch, sedating stuff one gets from food lines on the street. I’m sitting at my own sort-of desk, enjoying my own internet connection and listening to Alabama 3 on my own CD player.

The change in circumstances (which owes much to LBJ) has required more adjustment than anyone who hasn’t been homeless and otherwise disadvantaged might expect, but I’m settling in and the urge to do some writing has finally drawn even with the inertia of the past going-on-a-year, and today’s the day that writing wins. Yay!

I noted before the election that Nixon’s ultimately abandoned health care plan compared favorably to what Obama was proposing during the campaign. Nixon’s plan was aimed at forestalling then-freshman senator Ted Kennedy’s push for genuinely universal health care; Obama’s appears aimed at forestalling the more modest push from self-described progressives for a plan that might conceivably, in a perfect world, absent the inevitable Republican president or the inevitable GOP congressional resurgence or the venality of industry-captive Democrats, ultimately lead to publicly-financed universal health care a decade or three down the road—one that includes a “robust public option,” which for whatever reason no one wants to call open-enrollment Medicare or something similarly comprehensible.

Many people are aware that despite the general lack of overt evidence, Democrats hold the presidency and what in other eras might have been called a commanding majority in both houses of Congress. It’s the kind of political bonanza that Republicans of the past three decades would use to write their agenda in stone. Today’s Democrats seem to be having some difficulty even defining an agenda, never mind fielding one, never mind writing one into any durable surface.

A fair number of Democratic-leaning bloggers have noted the problem and advanced reasonable explanations of it, among which is that for practical purposes many Democrats are Republicans, in that they vote with Republicans more often than not, and many others are creatures of various big-money industries, which by and large aren’t particularly interested in promoting the social welfare. Even The Socialist Barack Obama^TM voted with Republicans four times in every ten in 2007, the year for which the National Journal tagged him with the label of most liberal senator; more liberal, supposedly, than even Vermont’s for real socialist senator, Bernie Sanders.

At the time, Obama supporters responded angrily to the “most liberal” label, noting that the senator had missed 35% of the votes that year because he was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, and arguing, exactly as if it were a good thing, that had he been present his ranking would have been considerably lower. The direct, amusing and no doubt accurate implication is that Obama would have voted with the administration even more often than he did if he hadn’t been out campaigning against their record.

So when Obama roared into power with the winds of change and an unassailable congressional majority at his back, he brought with him that history of voting with the Bush administration, particularly on “national security” issues, and an opening position on health care weaker than the one with which Nixon killed Kennedy’s 1972 efforts.

In politics as in biological evolution, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. (Okay, I made that up. But it sort of works.) Obama is what in other times would be described as a center-right Democrat, hawkish on “defense,” which means appallingly comfortable with growing the military and blowing other people up for no especially good reason, and uneasily liberal with respect to social issues.

Politically, Obama grew up in Chicago’s Democratic party. The Chicago machine is known for chewing up gentle men and women and spitting out mean ones. It’s not as though he’s unfamiliar with the politics of fear and power. He knows how to twist arms, or have them twisted on his behalf, and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has a reputation as one of the meanest men ever to emerge from that Chicago abattoir.

This is to say that they arrived in the White House with an enormous amount of public support and the political skills necessary to lead, massage and intimidate Congress into doing their bidding. But Obama’s natural passion seems to be for compromise rather than for any particular issue, and Emanuel’s positions on issues seem to be dictated by where the money is.

The health insurance legislation likely to emerge from Congress will benefit the insurance industry at least as much as it does those with inadequate access to health care. The bank bailout assuredly continues to benefit the financial industry waaaaaay more than it does the unemployed and the pre-unemployed. In both instances the president had sufficient clout to force a much better outcome, but he began from tepid positions with the intention to bargain.

The outcomes were predictable, and past performance is most likely indicative of future results. Obama is fond of saying that he won’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and it is becoming more and more clear that he won’t let the good be the enemy of the poor either.

Lots of pent up news and views. More later. Thanks for coming out tonight.