Maybe He Can’t

While admitting the gravest of the president’s left-wing betrayals, Kevin Baker over at Harper’s Magazine gives one of the more sober and compelling arguments for the continued support of Barack Obama in the 2012 election, but also raises the question of whether the man even wants the office.

“The whole rationale for the continuing existence of the conservative, Democratic Party leadership to which Mr. Obama belongs,” Baker begins, “is that they, and only they, can save us—save our Social Security and Medicare, prevent us from invading Iran, and keep the Supreme Court at least where it is now.”

But at the presidential debate in Denver last week, Obama “came apart before a national television audience,” prompting liberals to ask whether he has enough fight left in him to maintain even the pro-corporate, establishmentarian stance that has drawn sighs from committed leftists and brought much suffering on the public these last four years.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Political Asylum at Harper’s Magazine:

The diehards who posit that Obama is just setting Romney up for the next debate are fooling themselves. The idol really is smashed, and I suspect for good. Far from playing three-dimensional chess, the most logical explanation for the president’s Denver daze, as I wrote after the debate, is that he simply wants out. Who knew it was going to be the Skypilot himself, Flight Chief Obama, scrambling for the eject button while the rest of us tried to batter down the cockpit door and force him back into his seat?

I predict we’ll see further evidence that Obama’s heart isn’t in it. But we liberals are going to have to pull him through. We’re going to have to do it because the only alternative is too awful to contemplate, and there’s no time to replace him. We are going to have to push, and haul, and shove him back into the White House … even though the first thing he’s going to do once he gets there is to try his best to screw us over again. We have to save our own Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. We have to save the environment from catastrophic climate change. We have to prevent a disastrous invasion of Iran.

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