The President We Needed

Source: Getty Images North America

Just before taking office in 2009, President Obama attempted to reenergize the MLK Day of Service that had first been made official fifteen years before. This call came at an opportune time. A service holiday had always been a noble idea, fitting of Dr. King's legacy (hooray, another white dude expounding on King's legacy!). But by 2009, it was also a smart, practical way to get the country back to work in the middle of a biting recession. Get Americans to mend fences with one another as they pitched in to made their communities just a little bit nicer. Except a whole lot of us didn't do that. We continued to spend MLK Day the way we spend every Monday holiday: inside, bathing in the comforting glow of our screens. A day off means a day off, dammit.

That's a Royal We, by the way. I'm as much to blame as anyone. January is cold, man. And now that the Christmas lights are gone it's all grey, too, and you want me to go outside? And do stuff? Yeah, no thanks, Hussein. I did nothing this MLK Day except brace myself for... well, let's not get into that now, shall we? This is about positive reflection.

The point is, he looked at Americans and saw something better than what we were. Or maybe he saw what we could have been--and still could be. But we're not there yet. He expected Congress to act like adults who actually care about the people whose lives are affected by their work and they didn't. He expected his supporters to have his back in 2010 and they didn't. He expected his own party to unify and run an effective campaign to replace him and they didn't. That was the heart of Obama the Pollyanna: someone who counted on others to be the best people they could be. And kept doing that. Albert Einstein (who was not a mental health expert but was an accomplished guy in other disciplines so we keep quoting this) said something about the definition of insanity.

Looked at another way: Obama, Master of Cool, Calm, and Collected, was perhaps not ideally suited to lead a nation increasingly addicted to panic, outrage, and juvenile dramatics. He could try to talk us down from the ledge, and Lord knows he tried. But then one dipshit heckles him and then a lot of other people start yelling at the dipshit and then everybody's shouting and he's still standing up there, looking like he can distinctly hear the narrator from Arrested Development: "the nation continued to chant 'speech, speech, speech' for no one in particular."

So why would I have voted for him a third time? Because, in spite of all my liberal naval-gazing (do what you're good at, Mom always said), he was not the president we deserved, but the one we needed. And his was the example to aspire toward. Still is. That doesn't mean he always had the best solutions. You don't like his healthcare proposals? Find a different one and fight for it instead of torpedoing positive solutions and giving us a half-working sludge that'll be a nightmare to fix. Think he's too slow to get done the things that he promised to do? Call your congressman and tell them you want the work to get done, donate your time to organize marches and petition signings, show up to your bloody polling place. Life gets bad? Stand up, take a breath (or five; deep, slow, evenly-paced), brush it off, and get back to work.

None of this is new advice. You've heard it all before. They're the same positive-change platitudes that get proffered every time things look hard. They get repeated because we need the reminder now and again. They're creations of our better selves, yearning to break through from somewhere underneath, teased out of our evolved brains by our superegos. In other words, they don't come naturally. Our mammalian wiring, the stuff that still has us afraid of the dark and everything that's new and different: it's not far from the surface. It can take control very easily and will work to hinder every attempt we make at being better people. It's why we have the phrase "one step forward, two steps back." It's why we replaced a reasonable, stable, compassionate, classy, hyper-literate, upstanding citizen with his polar opposite. It would be hard to think up a more damning indictment of the man and his legacy, but here we are.

I try to imagine how things might've been if Obama had had a fraction of his successor's talent for self-promotion, but I'm not certain it would've made a difference. His biggest hindrance was the hand he was dealt (nation in crisis, hilariously hostile opposition, fickle base, on and on) and self-promotion only goes so far. It's not much good at building bridges when the people on the other shore are already convinced you're the anti-Christ. And it wouldn't have helped Clinton: self-promotion isn't transferrable. And, just as importantly, that wouldn't have been him. We loved the cool Obama. Making him into someone desperate to impress others would've killed the insouciant image we fell in love with.

Here's the part where I say we'll never see his like again, but it's not so dark as all that. Measured calm, dedication, work ethic, and being a really great guy is not so unusual a combination. And good things don't last, but they can be brought back. He wasn't the first president to have that combination. So it'll be a while before it comes 'round again, but it will. And I hope she invites him back to the White House for a fist-bump session. Before putting him on the Supreme Court.

Thanks, Obama.

Shutdown

Mrs. Half-Drunken Scribe is a non-furloughed federal employee. So she gets to keep working, probably for real money. Too many others aren't so lucky. That includes a lot of friends.

If congressional Republicans want to strike Obamacare from history, they need to appropriate funding to build a time machine, and use it to get Mitt Romney elected president. Obamacare may not be the most popular legislation (though it becomes less unpopular when referred to by its proper name), but it was installed by a democratically-elected House and Senate, and backed by a president who ran on a platform to improve access to healthcare. It survived a Supreme Court challenge. And when that same president, who banked his job on this very law, won reelection, that was end game. That was the signal from on high that this law, warts and all, must be allowed to go forward. To aim for anything less is cheap, cowardly, and unconstitutional.

And those were the appropriate adjectives before a government shutdown and a default crisis got thrown into the mix. But, after all, this is the Tea Party: the self-important, half-informed, thin-skinned, cosplaying, paper patriots. People for whom the democratic process becomes moot as soon as it coughs up a result they don't like. People who love America so much, they're willing to kill it before anyone else... gets access to healthcare.

They're not fighting against something that was rammed down America's throat, as they would have you believe; America's had ample opportunity to shut this thing down. Sure, the law isn't great, but when Republicans make every effort to block the thing, it's not because they have a better idea. They didn't have an answer for preexisting conditions and the subsequent millions of uninsured aside from "get a job." They didn't have--and still don't have--an answer for healthcare's abominable costs, only part of which will actually be addressed by Obamacare (again, not a great series of laws, just the best one possible (apparently)). They keep flogging free market approaches, cheerfully forgetting that the market is in no way capable of handling healthcare costs. They've got nothing. And they know it. Or they'd have had something substantive to add.

Now we get no government. For anyone or anything except "essential services." No one who matters seems to care about the blind-spots that will impact even the still-operating agencies. Or how the national economy will be impacted.

And then there's the $200 million that the Washington area could lose every day. Whenever you hear someone talk about DC, it's never about the people who live here. These people are abstractions, even the ones who don't work for the federal or city governments. But we feel the impact when spending gets cut, because we all know people getting furloughed, going without paychecks. There's a word for people who threaten livelihoods to prove ideological points. I'd tell it to you straight, but it'll stick better if you figure it out for yourself.

This will almost certainly hurt Republicans in the short and medium terms. And it probably won't affect the Affordable Care Act too badly (it may even give the program a crutch if people can blame any holes on a lack of government). But it's hard for me to care about either of those things right now.

I just want my friends to go back to work.

The NSA Pees In The Pool

I was refraining from saying anything about the NSA data-mining, also know as PRISM, also known as "you know how you know that there's urine in the pool, but you don't think about it?" In part because there's probably more to come. But also because what I have to say pales in comparison to what others have already written. Then I remember that I wrote a book about an overzealous surveillance state. And that I'm probably not allowed to let it pass just because that government is being operated by a president I kinda like.

We knew that private companies were compiling our information--for targeted advertising or for simpler customer service--and we had little problem with that. We can opt out of those, right? We knew that Google had a running record of our porn searches, but we didn't need to think about it. And we knew that with evolving communications technologies, we were creating our own records of ourselves: our movements, our purchases, our major and minor life events. Again, we were fine with that because that was our choice and whatever resulting wounds were self-inflicted.

But simultaneously, we also knew that the government was fighting a War on Terror somewhere in the background. We knew the Patriot Act existed (and had been reauthorized by Obama) alongside the NDAA and so many other innocent-sounding acronyms. We may not always have been conscious of it, and we kicked up brief fusses when something new plopped down in front of us: body imaging at the airport, removing our shoes at the airport, no liquids at the airport... a lot of it had to do with inconveniences when flying (we could've started taking trains, but trains are for Euro-fags). The point is, we could've--and some of us did--put two and two together a long time ago. We're not allowed to be shocked now. We can be outraged, on the understanding that we may look silly doing so. As of this writing, nothing appears to be illegal. On that level, some outrage is probably called for.

It was understandable of liberals to expect better of Obama, but never totally realistic (though, hey, torture's gone, so... whoo?). It's always been on us. We get the government we deserve. We wanted Internet, cell phones, and security. Welp.

From my time in the federal government, I know that low- and mid-level abuse is vanishingly rare (yes, I'm aware of the IRS thing). That kind of tinkering is both extremely illegal and also pointless for most bureaucrats to think about, because they don't want to intrude on your life--it creates more work for them. And I think of the hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras in operation in a place like London, where too much information is granted to an entity--however nefarious--to be of any good to anyone; they have to really want to track someone to get use out of the system and that initiative has to come from the top. I generally trust President Obama to use these methods with the right intent. I may, however, not trust his successor, just as I did not trust his predecessor.

And there's the rub.

If we're comfortable with one government being able to do a thing, we have to be comfortable with every subsequent government being able to do that thing. The government does not cede authority: that would be irrational on its part. And that goes double when presidents of both parties have done something. So now we ask questions. And it is we, because congressional Republicans can and will weasel out of investigating and fixing this (Benghazi this is not, apparently) and Democrats will be all too happy to slump away from the scene. Calmly, rationally (again, this is all legal and we only have ourselves to blame in the first place) we find out how the government uses the info and where's it been successful in the past (did it help get bin Laden? That would be bolster the case). Is the price of swimming in someone else's urine worth the convenience of being able to pee in the pool?

... I might have that analogy backward.

Maybe now we finally get the grown-up discussion about security and civil liberties. Maybe we don't let fear and anger rule the day. Maybe a kind of libertarian awakening occurs and we start pulling back the security apparatus we've allowed to be erected in our name. But that doesn't appear to be happening yet. And if the distracting argument of Edward Snowden's heroship or villainy is any indication, we're not yet ready for the adult conversation. That and the fact that I'm sure someone laughed at my use of the word "erected" (that person was me--I'm not ready for the conversation). 

Reading List for the Second Term

Glenn Beck is a bubbling pustule of a hack. Here are some books to prep you for the next four years. 

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
I don't anticipate a resurgence of the Occupy movement. Even if they do return in any significant way, they were more a hapless might-have-been than the boiling cauldron of class warfare some insisted they were. And with no leader, there wasn't even a Madame Defarge to speak of. The Tea Party, on the other hand, remains because we can't have nice things. The hard right isn't softening, if their fiscal cliff (now debt ceiling) fanaticism and Sandy Hook truther schemes demonstrate anything. And while the Tea Party is not the bottom-up revolt that was the French Revolution (quite the reverse, amazingly), there remains more than a hint of misdirected anger and not so veiled threats of violence that would've given Dickens more than enough material to work with. Despite--or because of--their unpopularity, they still see themselves as righteous victims, a siege mentality that's not quite ready to break, so we will hear from them again over this next term. And they have a few ready and willing Madames Defarge to chose from.

This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War - James M. McPherson
I don't want to look like I'm shitting on the spirit of 1776, because that was cool and important. But America didn't become the country we know today until we had to start killing each other instead of Brits and Native Americans. See, the Civil War never actually ended despite the awkward fact that it officially ended 148 years ago this Spring. McPherson's essays highlight not only how academia has viewed the war in the century and a half since its ostensible close, but how the nation's history and culture have been shaped by it. Particularly of note are chapters one (covering the historical revisionism and whitewashing that buttresses neo-Confederate mythology), eight (documenting the fights in Southern schools to ensure that Yankee intransigence Southern honor was taught properly, prefiguring the textbook battles of today), and sixteen (on Lincoln's dramatic use of "war powers" to expand executive control in times of emergency, something no president has done since).

Nixonland - Rick Perlstein
What the Civil War began, Nixon's Southern Strategy carved into stone. It was a cynical gambit that not only exploited the cultural divisions of the sixties, but deepened them for maximum political impact. It galvanized racial politics, launched the culture wars, and left a large chunk of the country permanently tied to the Republican Party (to the detriment of both). As Perlstein demonstrates, Nixon laid the template for everything that came after, from the self-perpetuating polarization to the modern conservative movement that is as much a profit-generating scheme as it is a political ideology. And whatever Nixon's successors wish to do to bring Americans back together, they keep finding Nixon still very much alive, gumming up the works.

I, Lucifer - Glen Duncan
This one actually has nothing to do with American politics. It's just a damn good book.

Nos Populus, however, does have something to do with American politics and is also available. You know, if you like reading your own political themes into explicitly political novels.

And He Didn't Even Need Ohio.

A bunch of barely related, late night thoughts

Mitt Romney ran for president for seven years and still lost to the black guy in the sluggish economy.

Barack Obama is a two-term president. Savor that one. Say it aloud a few times. Taste it... know it... love it. We are pregnant with a second Obama term and, yes Republicans, it is a gift from God.

Mitch McConnell needs to Go. The Fuck. Away.

Nate Silver needs no defending. Not from me, anyway (especially when others have done it so well already). But, next time you want to slander a decent, hard-working nerd for saying something you don't like: remember this night. Hard numbers, boring though they may be, are nothing to fear. The end of your relevancy as lazy media dinosaurs, okay, that'll be kinda scary. We still don't care.

Next time Andrew Sullivan feels like hyperventilating, he needs to toke up. And then blog at us.

However, in fairness to Sullivan, Obama now needs to explain that first debate performance. We gave you another term, dude, you're golden. Just tell us what the hell happened. A real answer--not the campaign-caliber answer you gave Jon Stewart. Was it an Ambien kick? Malaria? Just trying to make things interesting?

Karl Rove sure is funny, ain't he? And looks like "a really sad Benjamin Franklin impersonator," as my wife said. My question: has Fox always been this entertaining? Why have I been missing this? Is this where their ratings come from? Whatever it is, they can look forward to four more years of those.

Good night, everybody. I'll see you in the morning, when a bitter, entitled Mittens is still refusing to concede.

Obama, Head Bee Guy

Let's get this out of the way up front: no, he's not the golden god too many of us expected he would be. He was never going to be. But whose fault was that? Remember: we endowed him with the "I Got This" aura and then didn't show up to vote in the 2010 midterms. Sure, he kind of embraced the idea in 2008. But what functioning politician wouldn't in the heat of a campaign?

"We have a substantial check here for a Mr. Abraham Simpson."

"That's right, I did the Iggy."

The whole Hope and Change thing--as much opportunistically taken on as it was naively thrust upon--was the Obama Administration's original sin. And like the theological concept, it's outdated and unfair because nothing can be done about it now. But let's check the ledger:

Barack Obama achieved the single most important domestic legislation in a generation, rescued the U.S. Auto Industry, signed fair pair legislation (which had somehow not come to pass until 2009), backed gay rights as thoroughly as any president could, got us out of Iraq, laid the ground-work for the Afghanistan exit, didn't get bogged down anywhere else, and all but dismantled al-Qaeda. You're welcome, right? It's frustrating to me, too, that he's either incapable of or unwilling to tout his credentials well, but that's also part of the reason I like him: his hesitancy to play the game so publicly. You can chalk that up to arrogance (a stupid word to use, anyway, since presidents need to be arrogant), however it's a much more attractive kind of arrogance than that of his predecessor.

There's a thing about the modern American left that nothing ever seems good enough. You've heard it before: we could've had real universal healthcare, etc. First, no we couldn't have. See above about the Lilly Ledbetter Act: it took us long enough to get us something that should've been common sense decades ago--so how much can we reasonably expect? Second, Obama's not a liberal. At least, he doesn't govern as one. He has enough working against him when he doesn't (did you know that he's foreign-born and that he lied about his college grades, or some stupid thing?). See, Obama--like Obamacare--is a bridge to a less insane America, not the new America incarnate. The fact that some don't like these gradual, evolutionary adjustments is part of the reason the left has lost its foothold in the political discourse over the last generation. Yes, this quickly becomes a lesser-of-two-evils argument. It's always a lesser-of-two-evils argument. Nut up and dance with who brung you. Or vote third party.

And the NDAA and the ongoing drone wars? Yeah, okay, those bother me, too. Obama's given himself and future presidents far-reaching tools that should chill every American to the bone. And if he's lost any supporters over these matters, well, I can't fault that too much. However, this is the long-fermenting result of a power-amassing executive branch predicated upon the idea that the American people truck for "strong leadership," an idea that Americans have not generally disputed. But it helps to understand that the bloated security state and foreign policy apparatus exist almost independent of the whims of ideology these days: self-reinforcing structures that no president seems interested in tackling anymore (the last president, to my mind, who came into office with a greater interest in foreign affairs than domestic ones was Nixon). Romney, suffice to say, does not seem inclined to reverse that trend.

So, no. Obama ain't perfect. But we were never going to get perfect. Not in this economic and political climate. On the economy, he inherited an historic financial meltdown that he's mostly steered back to normalcy. It's amazing how easily that's been forgotten: how much can we fairly expect of a president in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 30's? And, however badly we might be hurting, notice none of us are living in Bushvilles.

Then there's the political climate. Or don't you remember the right-wing opposition that has snarled and gnashed their teeth for four years straight, doing everything they can to halt whatever they think Obama might be up to? An unconscionable congressional opposition that has explicitly made it their mission to destroy him. This is also the first president to have a 24-hour news network dedicated to slandering him. Fox News has raised a yammering army of Obama-deranged personalities for their cause; that a talking cat anus like Donald Trump has been allowed to make himself into a regarded commentator speaks volumes about the dearth of substance in our media. Think about what Obama could've accomplished with the kind of mindless obeisance that Bush II enjoyed at one time. In a robust polity, we would call out the hateful, childish tactics for what they are (political and economic terrorism) rather than rewarding them.

Of course, it could be argued that no man has the answer to being president in the Internet Age, where facts are fuzzy at best and all discourse is subject to the most primal instincts of an angry and imperfectly-evolved species. So on that front, I'm not sure Mr. Romney can hope to fair any better. After all, if the politics of obstruction prove feasible, what's to stop the left from making likewise?

And what of the president's opponent: that grinning parody of every shifting, shameless politician you've ever seen in TV or film. I once called John McCain one of the most cynical men ever to vie for the White House. And, with luck, the Sarah Palin pick will long stand as a high-water mark for miscalculated pandering. But Mitt Romney has found ground even McCain never dreamed of. What we have in Mittens is not an empty vessel of the Palin variety, but of its own, more terrifying kind: one that can be emptied and refilled again and again (sometimes stunningly quickly), never minding the slow erosion of its own self.

Romney, in his businessman-type way, believes that he is a product to be marketed, rather than structurally improved. It's easy to laugh at his tragicomic attempts at humanity, but it's in these moments that we see the truth: there is no there there. He is whatever he thinks will get him the prize. Not the stoic ship captain Obama has been (a trait even Gov. Christie now seems to appreciate), but the hapless, quick to ill-planned action sitcom dad.

And remember that thing I said about dancing with who brung you? President Romney will know that well. He'll have to work with a House and potentially a Senate comprised of the Limbaugh wing of his party. This is the social party of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. The fiscal party of Grover Norquist and Paul Ryan, Romney's VP and a signer to Norquist's juvenile no-tax pledge (and who publicly admits that he thinks Ayn Rand is a good writer). And then there are the Court appointments, several of which have been dangling for a decade or so as the justices get older.

He'll wear the Moderate Mitt Mask for now--it plays well with the marks in the 'burbs--but at some point he's gotta make good on that selling point about working with legislatures (balancing a state's budget is a lot easier when it's mandated by state law; and while we're here, I seem to recall Bush II touting similar credentials in reaching across the aisle--what is it about Republican governors that makes them think party dynamics work the same in state capitals as they do in Washington?). And the unmoored GOP that shrugged and said "okay, him," will want to cash in their chips for allowing Romney to go up against a president that they themselves had so handicapped. So guess who'll get to pick Mitt's next mask?

Now think on what kind of leverage Obama gets when he returns from re-election, able to look John Boehner square in his orange face and say, "I ain't dead yet, Oompa-Loompa."

Take this as you will. The lesser-of-two-evils. The devil you know. Not the president we deserve but the president we need. It's several parts of each. But in this week when the nation's two major news media centers have been hammered by much larger events (actually, DC got off relatively easy), we're in a place to put this campaign into perspective and think about the role of government as more than a philosophical debate. And, hopefully, with a better understanding of what the choices are.

Request Time

I said I wasn't going to do this, but since I've been asked, yes, Bill Clinton gave a pretty great speech last night. It's been accompanied by the usual hyperbole, as well as some healthy gushing. And both of those are to be expected. Whatever the man's flaws, Clinton knows how make politico's brains short-circuit--regardless of their party affiliation. His speech last night had the substance people never got from Paul Ryan's, a natural charm that Mitt Romney cannot contemplate, and the thorough defense of Obama's record that Obama has been unable to provide. I don't even care that it was long; you got something important to do? Grade: B+.

But for my money, Michelle Obama gave the superior speech. Satisfying though it was to see Bubba hammer the GOP on their lazy math and lazier lies (with a few nervous, dated, and--yes--lazy Lewinsky jokes hurled by the Right in panicky response), Obama spotlit the other pernicious lies that Romney shamelessly tolerates. She spat in the plug-ugly faces of the Birther-esque insinuations of Barack's foreignness, socialism, and thousand-years-of-darkness lunacy. Where Ann Romney pleaded with us to trust her that her husband is a great guy, Obama gave us anecdotal examples of her husband's humanity. Mittens might want to take us all home from the dance safely, but Barack wants to lift us onto the shoulders of past American giants to help us continue to live the Dream (yes, both of those analogies contain some Big Brother imagery; blame the generations of American voters who have demanded "strong leadership"). She took those lies, twisted them into inedible pretzels, and handed them back to the Republicans. All with a lump in her throat. Grade: A- (lost points for the saccharine "Mom-in-Chief" line).

Now we wait to see if her husband can trump both of them. Because make no mistake: he has to at least match that bar for any of this to mean anything. The guy better know how to give a convention speech.

How long until...

... Mittens starts campaigning against activist judges?  And how obscene an amount of money will he be able to raise to run ads about the evils of activist judges because those same judges decreed that he's allowed to do as much of that as he can?

... The Obamas are getting it on in the Lincoln bedroom?  Ain't no sex like just-changed-the-shape-of-nation's-moral-and-financial-priorities sex. 

... Republicans remember that the mandate was originally their idea?  And suffer a stroke trying to figure out how to campaign on that without riling up the colonial cos-players they've so eagerly grabbed their ankles for the past three years? 

... CNN acknowledges this?  You know, just to clear the air. 

... we find out how many uses of "fuck" will show up in Scalia's dissent?  Over/under is 6.5. 

Obama Likes Gay Marriage. Good For Him.

I posted my review of Albert Brooks' 2030 right about the time Obama was telling ABC News that he "personally" thinks gay couples should be able to get married (and since I've been grading everything lately, I give Obama's endorsement a "B").  I knew it was happening even as I was completing the review, but wanted to finish that first because, well, I cared more about that.  Like most everything else in Obama's presidency, my reaction to this was a measured "Cool.  Now what?"  If that sounds lukewarm, it's because it is; I long have been on him.  I like him more than any other politician, but I learned long ago not to get too attached to any of them.  Not because they're inherently untrustworthy necessarily--I've always found that point-of-view much, much too easy--but because their job descriptions and the people who would want those jobs are fucked up.

The left-wing moaning about "great timing," intoned in the most sarcastic voices they can manage, is stupid.  As is all of their domestic issues-related hand-wringing over this guy.  Yes, his (and others') vacillating is annoying, especially if you're of my generation and gay marriage is a no-brainer.  But for a man of his generation, it's tougher.  That's not to forgive the unforgivable hemming and hawing that leaves a whole segment of the population swaying in the wind with regard to their basic human rights, but how much do we seriously expect Obama to be able to do, even with an historic endorsement like this?  At least for now, states decide the matter.  I don't like that--it means the rights of the minority frequently take a backseat to the irrational whims of the tyrannical majority, but it's the system we have.  Some will point to DOMA, but that's more Congress' ballpark and how often have they seen eye-to-eye with Obama these last few years?  Now, if you are gay and especially if you're in a committed relationship and especially if you're living in North Carolina (or any other state that refuses your right to happiness)... I got nothing.  I'm truly sorry.  The worst part of government interference in people's personal lives is that it's turned a whole segment of the population into collateral damage, all because some screeching homophobes see nothing but a political football with which to score points.  Smear the queer, indeed. 

Some of my Republican friends will flog that pathetic canard that "both sides do it" and say that this constitutes a flip-flop.  Yeah, it does.  Obama supported gay marriage back in 1996 and then reversed that sometime prior to 2008, then supporting civil unions.  That was the real flip.  Now he's just flopped back.  But if a presidential candidate is going to reverse himself on this issue, I greatly prefer this evolution (let's please stop abusing that word) change of heart to Mittens' direction.  Not that I care much about politicians' flip-flops.  I expect it and, if not done too frequently, almost prefer it.  It demonstrates that they are not unthinking or--more often--that they can respond to changing facts on the ground.  What I do demand is coherence, something Romney often seems to lack, perhaps particularly on this. 

We should take Obama's announcement for the brief "finally" it deserves and get back to things that can actually impact the issue, like overturning the existing nonsensical bans and making sure they don't get put in place in other states this year. 

Next time: Dinosaurs!