Darwin Lives…

They said he came out of Chicago and played politics in the Chicago way. Hard scrabble. No one, not even his fiercest opponents could have predicted how easy it would be to roll the new president. But roll him they did. And now the law of the jungle prevails. Darwin apparently lives.

It didn’t help that his own party was spineless, and possibly leaderless. And now, Obama is on the brink of a presidential failure perhaps unparalleled in modern presidential history. And in his fall will be the  fall of America. The fall will be so great it is hard to imagine another Democratic majority as far as the eye can see.

It is not so much that Obama’s policy failures will devastate the country. Those failures will. More, it is that the methodology used to defeat the agenda of a majority government will become standard practice. And that practice will lead to institutional dysfunction. Out of power parties will use the Republican playbook to in essence undo electoral results. It does no party any good. It ill serves the nation.

Can the situation be saved?  Much depends on being able to play that Chicago style of politics.