I find it laughable that, in this day and age of huge corporate donations and well-organized conservative political PACs, anyone thinks Obama could have "pulled an LBJ" and strong-armed Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats into submission. That's just not realistic. There is nothing that the administration could offer these people that would stack up against the giant piles of money corporations and PACs funnel into their election coffers. And there's nothing they could offer that would give them any more power, notoriety or "fame" than they get from the grandstanding they are performing right now.

Nothing.

This is a different world than existed in LBJ's day. Besides the more intense impact of corporate funding and PAC money, the filibuster is used today in ways it never was back then. And it's probably worth reminding folks that Obama got elected because he promised to change the way politics is done in Washington. That's a big part of the reason people like me voted for him. He was different. He actually gave us some hope that he might actually be able to bring disparate groups together to solve America's problem.

So when Joe Fucking Lieberman pulls his shit and does his self-serving, narcissistic craptastic dance to attract attention to himself, it's disingenuous to suggest that somehow the president could have changed that. He couldn't. Lieberman is a fuck now and would have been a fuck no matter what Obama and Axelrod and Emmanuel and Reid did. Period. That's what Lieberman does. You want to blame someone? Blame the voters of Connecticut. That's a good place to start. Kossacks tried to tell them different, that's for sure.

This is not Barack Obama's failure. It's Joe Lieberman's failure. It's Ben Nelson's failure. It's Mary Landrieu's failure. It's Bart Stupak's failure. It's the Republican's failure. Nothing Obama and Co. could have done would have changed the way these douchenozzles acted.

If he had threatened to veto any legislation that didn't include [fill in the blank], they would have said, "Fine. Status quo works for me." And then we'd be no further ahead than we were last year. Or the year before that. Or the decade before that. Or...

About the only fault you could place at their doorstep, in my opinion, is the decision last spring to let Lieberman into the fold and to give him any kind of leadership position. While that argument at least holds some weight, I doubt that most people knew at the time what an incredible fuckwad he'd turn out to be. And, even if they did know, does anyone think Lieberman would have behaved differently if they hadn't allowed him into the fold? He's still a Senator that was a "swing vote" and his leadership position doesn't play into that. He still would have been able to do all the douchey obstructionist horseshit he's doing today. How could he have voted or behaved differently that would be any worse than what he's doing now???

God help us if we don't extract some good out of this reform. Thanks primarily to Democrats (ugh!), there will be Democratic blood on the floor in 2010 if we don't.

But, in the final analysis, making President Obama the scapegoat doesn't address the core issues that have us where we are today: Corporate influence on campaigns, grandstanding conservatives determined to hijack any issue they can in order to draw power to themselves, and the lack of truly progressive members of Congress. If we want to change this country in the progressive direction, those are the areas where we should be focusing our attention. Not on making Barack Obama our scapegoat.

I'm just sayin'...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

UPDATE: There are looo-oooots of people claiming in the comments that this is some sort of Obamabot defense of Barack Obama. It's not and any careful reading of it should make that obvious. He neither needs nor would seek that.

Rather, this is a diary about making sure that we are focusing on the root cause of the problems we're facing right now, problems I outlined in the diary. When I say "there's not one thing that President Obama could have done would have changed any of this", that's an opinion. Obviously. Maybe you think he could have jaw-boned Nelson and Stupak and Lieberman. Maybe you think he could have beat them about the head and shoulders (politically-speaking) and they would have gotten in line. Maybe you think he could have been more outspoken about the public option and by some miracle, the magic of his oratory would have convinced this small handful of recalcitrant Conservadems and Joe Lieberman (and maybe even a Republican or two) to back his legislative goals.

I disagree and I think it's unrealistic to believe otherwise.

What I believe is that we need to be fighting for campaign finance reform to remove corporate cash from the equation and to be fighting for filling Congress with more progressive members.

Blaming Obama for this debacle does neither of those things and it is tilting at the wrong windmill.