You have to wonder.
The really big legislation he's passed has made the industries it was supposed to target happy.
With a Republican Congress, he could work with his bluedog allies and get things passed big-time-- things that score points with the banksters and corpos he is really loyal to.
Clinton won a second term after losing the Congress. Maybe Obama is following in the same mold. His White House team has full contempt for the progressives who helped elect Obama-- full, florid, out in the open disdain for liberals and horrors, even worse, progressives.
So maybe his team thinks they'll look better fighting Republicans, who, if, and it is looking more and more likely that horror will happen, thanks to chronic Democratic constituent betrayal, they win, will be in deep doo doo by the time the 2012 election rolls along.
Americans have such short memories. They could very well elect a GOP majority this fall. It might even be refreshing. Republicans are flat out corpo-whores, unlike Democrats who incompetently fail to pretend they are not corpo whores.
America needs major campaign finance reform-- not the half-assed legislation Schumer and company are offering. We need elimination of big money in politics. Until we demand it loudly and firmly, our politicians will be hopelessly addicted to the megacorporation teat.
I've finally reached the conclusion that while there's some difference between the Dems and Republicans, when it comes to the really substantive issues, neither have any loyalty to constituents. It's not all their fault-- the election finance system produces it. But it IS their fault that they don't vote their way out of it.
Paulo Freire writes, in his must read classic book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that only the oppressed can liberate themselves from oppression. The oppressors can't do it. That means we-the-people must rise up in whatever way is necessary to force Congress to reform campaign finance. It is not going to be pretty. It is a hard thing to do, because the symptoms of failure to enact campaign finance are what people object to, not the absence of campaign finance.
It's an intellectual leap to realize that our lousy health care system, our failed banking system, our failed regulation of oil exploration, and on and on are all due to failure to reform election finance. We need solutions on how to wake up the people so they are shouting in the streets, demanding immediate election finance reform.
The legislative solution is at fixcongressnow.com. But how we get a majority in both houses to pass it -- that's the question.