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Could be worse. Could be worse.

By Michael J. Smith on Tuesday December 23, 2008 06:22 PM

Matthew Yglesias has found something to like about Obama's cabinet and staff appointments:

[Obama's appointments are] on average to the right of the average Democratic member of congress. It’s worth understanding, however, that the same methodology would lead to the conclusion that Obama’s cabinet is to the left of the veto points in congress.

Those points are the median member of the House (a Blue Dog) and in the Senate either a centrist Democrat for things requiring a majority or else someone like Susan Collins to break a filibuster. It’s those characters who determine the scope of what’s possible legislatively. And though I think progressives will have many disappointments in the coming years, many more of those disappointments will come because something good Obama proposes gets watered-down in congress than because congress wants to do something good and somehow gets thwarted by the White House.

In other words: Obama may be dismayingly right-wing, but he's still not as bad as Congress. What a relief! We sure dodged a bullet there!

Comments (8)

They didn't say it was change you *should* believe in, did they?

(Sorry if this is a duplicate. I received server errors and am retrying without HTML).

Peter Ward:

I guess it's good liberals are honest about the venal nature of their party an their chosen one...?

Matt Hardwick:

And though I think progressives will have many disappointments in the coming years, many more of those disappointments will come because something good Obama proposes gets watered-down in congress than because congress wants to do something good and somehow gets thwarted by the White House.

No, many more of those disappointments will come because progressives like Yglesias or the Kossacks or the UFPJ or Code Pink or, or, or, or...etc, etc, etc, will be so scared of trying anything new or even merely expanding their paltry gains that they won't rack up enough failure to come up with success.

Disappointment is comforting, see. To paraphrase Charles Schulz, hitting the bullseye risks ruining a perfect record, see...::sighs::

Michael Hureaux:

I get it. Broken glass is less jagged --ah, or the crunchier kind is easier to roll in- no, that's not it. Who needs skin, anyway?

Wow. The pretencho-stench of Ivy strikes again:

"Matthew Yglesias is an Associate Editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His first book, Heads in the Sand, a critical analysis of the Democratic Party's failure to produce a coherent alternative to the Bush foreign policy, will be published on April 25 by Wiley.

"Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

'His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

"Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly."

Al Schumann:
"Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly."

It's a wonder he doesn't keel over from toxic cutesy-poo syndrome.

LA Confidential Pantload:

Wonder what that "coherent alternative" was. IIRC, he supported the invasion of Iraq. Of course, that was then - this is now.

I don't object to one apologizing for the status quo as long as one is prepared to acknowledge in vivid detail the violence, physical and psychological, the status quo inflicts. At any rate it's a logical possibility that in fact Obama as we find him is the best we can hope for given the present circumstances--in the short run this is almost certainly the case, incidentally. The hypocrisy lies in evils of the present setup being consistently evaded and the source this hypocrisy seems to be the fear of the powers that be that perhaps in fact things can be made better (that is, made better for us and worse for them).

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