Hurricane Katrina Levels the White House

Katrina Vanden Heuvel was brilliant in her emotion-laden criticism of the President on Cenk Uygur’s show today:
“We’ve seen this time and time again: A president preemptively making concessions that abet his opponents and demoralize his supporters. Compromise is demanded in politics, but leadership can not be defined by compromise.
This president was dealt a good hand in many ways, but his preemptive concessions took away that good hand. And he had public opinion on his side, but you can’t just let that sit there. You have to mobilize public opinion with your leadership.
Our system is rigged in many ways through the power of establishment money and through the lobbyists who swamp Washington D.C. every day. But you can provide leadership that lays out a different narrative.
We’re having this debate about the budget in the completely wrong framework. Our priorities are skewed. A budget is not just a set of numbers. It’s a moral document. It is also a reflection of a nation’s values and aspirations.
And, if we’re a nation that’s going to balance the budget on the backs of the working class and low income Americans, to the benefit of the richest and the multinational corporations that out-source jobs, then we are a nation in dire need of our own pro-democracy movement to take back this country for the people who built it and made it strong, and to take it away from those who brought us the financial crisis that robbed trillions of dollars from people who have worked so hard for decades.
We need to understand what we’re going to do outside of the White House, outside of Washington D.C. It’s late for that. We need independent organizing in this country to change the balance of forces, to change the nature of political power, and to find a way to have a different debate because, with all due respect, this president is not going to lead us to the promised land. We have a blueprint of cruelty in the GOP plan. Let us not forget that they never had a mandate to do what they’re doing. It was a lousy economy and joblessness, not a desire for big spending cuts, that got them elected in 2010.
But this president is seeking reelection. This president is charting his own course, a course that sadly has demobilized the base that elected him.
It’s insanity that military spending constitutes 58% of the discretionary spending budget. We have, in inflation-adjusted terms, a military budget that’s larger than it was during the Bush years or the Cold War. That’s insanity. And two wars costing about 120 billion dollars a year.
We can do better. But it’s going to require people outside of Washington working with allies inside Congress. And we can say to them, ‘Enough.' There’s a disconnect between what’s going on in Washington and what this country needs. "