The modus operandi of Congressional Republicans and conservative, "blue dog" Democrats ought to be clear by now: delay, distort and chip away at all possible elements of real, progressive change on issues of health care, the environment and economic justice. Force Democrats to compromise and accommodate in the hopes of achieving that magic 60 votes in the Senate that can forestall a filibuster. Then, when a bill at long last comes to the floor, threaten to vote against the bill anyway, claiming no one really wants it, forcing even more evisceration of any remaining remnants of meaningful reform. Of course, by then the legislation is so compromised that liberal Dems can not vote for it either without holding their noses.

The mistake made by the Obama administration and Congressional allies was believing that the opposition was ever negotiating in good faith, that a spirit of bipartisan cooperation was possible, that the opposition would ever allow the President to be a healer, to bring the country together for the sake of meaningful change. What the opposition has always wanted, despite some mouthings to the contrary, is for Obama to fail. Instead of being humbled by the utter failure of the Bush administration and everything it stood for, their desire is simply to even the score.

Obama and progressives in the House and Senate should unburden themselves of their illusions. It is long since time to play hardball in the face of obstructionism. Arguably, it would even have been better to bring truly meaningful legislation to a vote, even in the face of certain defeat. By standing tall and vigorously articulating the changes most Americans want and need, at least the citizenry will be able to discern who it is that is blocking reform, who it is that is perpetuating business as usual. A sustained groundswell of informed public outrage would ultimately be perilous for politicians to ignore.

Healthcare is an example of the Democrats' failure: most Americans want and need something like Medicare for all, which would cut administrative expenses and cover everyone, as has been demonstrated in advanced democracies around the globe. The bill that has emerged from the Senate may include a few improvements over the current system, but at the expense of further entrenching the inefficient private insurance monopoly. It is potentially a lose / lose dilemma for the Democrats: if a bill ultimately fails to pass, it will be a huge embarrassment for Obama; if it emerges from Senate / House conference without the more progressive and effective provisions of the original House bill, and subsequently passes, there will likely be hell to pay not far down the road, when consumers are forced into buying private insurance, including many who don't want it and can't afford it but are not quite poor enough to qualify for public subsidies. They will resent this government mandate, and Republicans will exploit this resentment to the max. At the very least, progressives in the House should hold fast, and the Senate leadership should twist arms and play the procedural rules game to assure an effective bill makes it to Obama's desk.

We need a paradigm shift, and the Democratic mainstream and leadership have so far not only failed to provide it, but have helped to squelch it. The sea-change in public perceptions and progressive energy that swept this country in 2006-2008 has been drowned in a swamp of cautious compromise and pragmatic accommodation, of muddied ideological waters and deflated expectations. And Adventures in Afghanistan, for which Obama has no one to blame but himself. Stimulating consumer spending is touted as the way to create new jobs — but what kind of jobs, and serving what kind of needs? Consumers with any disposable income would be better off saving more and spending less, and especially, paying down their credit card debt. The "market economy" that so many have made a religion of has just produced 4000 new hotel rooms in Las Vegas in one huge development project. Is this what society really needs? The projects the world needs will create jobs in energy efficiency, clean, sustainable electrical generation and green transportation infrastructure. If the private sector is unwilling to invest adequately in what's actually needed, governments should step up to the plate — it worked during the Roosevelt years, and especially during WW II, when consumers restrained spending and bought government bonds. Annual US deficits and total debt were both nearly three times what they are now relative to GDP, but guess what: the country prospered and the fascist disaster was thwarted.

Nothing exemplifies the erosion of hope for change more than the failure to propose meaningful energy and climate legislation. The global scientific consensus is that a 25%-45% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2020 compared to 1990 levels is an absolute necessity to avoid catastrophic, irreversible, run-away ecological disaster. The US is now proposing a 17% reduction below 2005 levels, which works out to 4% below 1990. But even this 4% is illusory, because it will be "achieved," not through actual emissions reductions, but by "offsetting" emissions with supposed reductions elsewhere, mostly in the Third World. But these "offsets" are notoriously subject to tricky arithmetic, to fraudulent accounting that is enforceable neither in theory nor practice. This is a recipe for neither sustainable prosperity nor avoiding ecological disaster.

Short-term greed always seems to trump long-term need. Small island nations and low-lying countries such as Bangladesh are already in extreme peril due to rising seas and the increasing severity of hurricane storm surges. Huge populations elsewhere are suffering agricultural calamity due to increased drought, rapid desertification and the devastating cycle brought by melting of mountain glaciers (flooding) followed by water scarcity as these snows then disappear and streams dry up. Children being born today will likely live to see a world where species extinction is unimaginably horrendous, while untold trillions are squandered building dikes in an ultimately futile attempt to hold back the sea from major coastal cities across the globe. And their grandchildren will fight for space on shrunken continents whose shorelines are nearly unrecognizable from today's maps.

All so that people in the developed world today can buy more stuff and the wealthiest fraction of a percent can accumulate more billions peddling fossil fuels and the things that depend on them. Incredibly, energy legislation being debated in Congress includes continued subsidies for coal, for offshore drilling and the never-never-land of nuclear generation. Meanwhile, the Alberta tar sands monstrosity proceeds apace.

Happy New Year.