Republican

I wrote up a retrospective earlier this week about Obama's accomplishments during his first term where I agreed with Paul Krugman that Obama did a lot of great things and that while he may not have pleased everyone on the Left, what he did is still pretty impressive.

If you remember, Obama spent much of the first year of his first term securing money to bail out banks and industries, essentially making sure the entire country didn't go the way of Lehman Brothers. Well, check.

When people talk about politics, I feel like the default mode of conversation is to complain about what isn't going well. There seems to be 10 times as much conversation about why people are upset as there is about things people are happy with. And while that may be just the way human nature is, President Obama seems to take the criticism from all sides.

The Koch brothers, two wealthy conservatives who have put their millions behind countless Republican candidates through campaign donations and their Americans for Prosperity Group, are coming out publicly against the GOP stance on the debt ceiling. They worry that the Republicans will be seen as "hostage takers" in the debate. Yikes.

To hear President Obama tell it, we are relatively close to turning the national debt into a manageable pet rather than a six-headed beast breathing fire on our finances. In his speech earlier this week, Obama said that what we need is to find a way for Republicans and Democrats to agree on $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and new tax revenue. If we can do this, we can keep the national debt at seventy-something percent of the projected gross GDP for the next decade or so.

Once upon a time, in a mythical land surrounded by water and the sense that all hope was flowing away on that water, there was an idea. The leaders of this great land would gather in their ancient buildings and argue their ancient arguments. Each morning the storytellers of the land would go out to the people and tell of the goings on behind the grand walls of the great leaders, and the people would shake their heads, wondering when the news would be something besides "Wait a bit longer- we'll figure this out soon…"