I'm still getting over my surprisingly resilient bug, but while I'm recuperatin' you can take a look at this excellent piece by Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford. An excerpt:
Obama has always told everyone in range of his voice that his main goal in life is to forge a grand consensus with the GOP, a bipartisan understanding between the Right and the Center Right.
The result is an Obama budget that is all sliced up, like the loser in a knife fight – only, Obama and his corporate executives-on-loan at the White House did all the cutting, themselves. Obama is showing such extraordinary talent for obliterating poor and working class programs across the board, he’s making Republicans look redundant and obsolete.
"Making Republicans look redundant and obsolete" could be the motto of the Democratic Party at this point, actually. And characteristically, Ford fixes the blame where it belongs:
No, the shame is not Obama’s. The people who should be scandalized by the president’s budget are the enablers on the Left who abrogated their political responsibility to the people – and to Truth – by inventing an Obama that did not exist, back in 2007 and 2008. The shame of the proposed 2012 budget rests on the heads of those Blacks and progressives in leadership positions who chose to mis-lead their constituencies in ’07 and ’08, who refused to make even one demand, or even a mild request of Obama, the candidate – and thus rendered Blacks and progressives politically irrelevant.
Ford could just as well have added: and who are planning to do it again in 2012. It reminds me of an old joke:
Question: What's more pathetic than the U.S. left?
Answer: …
Oh wait—that's not a joke, it's an actual question I starting asking myself years ago, and I still haven't come up with an answer. I'm open to suggestions.
The Distant Ocean 
I think Obama is more pathetic. It seems to me he wants to please the right and nothing he does will get him an attaboy (but he doesn’t understand that). Hmm, I guess it’s the same kind of pathetic.
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I find it impossible to believe that Obama thinks he will receive the general approbation of the Republicans in Congress or those on TV. He proposes the policies he genuinely believes will maintain the nation’s strength and stability. Who can say at the moment that he is wrong about that? If tens of millions in the US suffer through a decade or more of dashed hopes, meager employment opportunities, even shortened life spans, …. well …. such outcomes as those are not as important as the strength and stability of the state … or, so say the leaders.
That there may exist a path through the next few decades that avoids widespread immiseration is not an alternative that Obama is likely to be forced to notice. Nothing in the nation’s history or its present social and political structures suggests that an alternative to austerity (with various exceptions) will ever be considered unless its consideration is forced by popular resistance. Popular resistance requires that millions of individuals perceive that their expected degree of immiseration is such as to overwhelm their long conditioning in the acceptance of whatever the leaders say is necessary.
The people have no bread? Let them eat overseas victories as shown on TV.
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