I Suspect This Author Doesn't Understand

Obama isn't naive--he is PART of the problem in this country because he is basically one of the GOP. Call him a mole or a Manchurian candidate, he is what he is. He's doing exactly what his masters want him to do, which is against what the American people want him to do.

Obama DOES have contempt for the people who voted for him as much as for those who didn't.

It has been said that Barack Obama's picture of himself as a universal conciliator is a delusion in the clinical sense: a fixed false belief. If so, it was a false belief that suited the enchanted years that led to 2008, and that was never dispelled by a study of the 1990s, when Obama was cocooned in ambition and took little notice of the national scene. It was wrong of him to say in 2008 that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was merely an excess of "partisan bickering." It was a raging fever then, as it is now. It has never gone away. What is strange is that the delusion has not been dispelled by the daily experience of four years as president. Not even the debt-ceiling negotiations, when he told an imaginary bipartisan Congress to "pull off the Band-Aid" and "eat our peas," and put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block and came back empty-handed -- not even that enormity of executive delay and disengagement and triple dealing with John Boehner and Eric Cantor seems to have taught the president the futility of thinking on those lines.

With his equable facade and his inability to admit what he is up against, Obama resembles the baffled psychiatrist who says to the terrible girl in The Ring: "You don't want to hurt anyone." The Tea Party (if it could reply) would say, as the girl says: "But I do, and I'm sorry. It won't stop." Why would anyone expect them to stop? With the ideas they have, and the society they wish for, and their success thus far, they have no internal reason to stop. In 2013, will Barack Obama act on any other plan than his "expectation" that somehow, this time, nevertheless, they will stop?

The author still operates under the assumption the Democratic Party is the same party it was 30 or 40 years ago and therefore Obama merely suffers from some kind of "delusion" about dealing with the other side. It isn't. It is now completely under the spell of the neolibs the same way the GOP is.

He needs to read Glen Ford or Paul Street. They would set him straight.