Obama's Epic Nose Dive Off the Cliffs of Health Care, Economy

So here we are, not a year into the Change & Hope presidency, and we're already divining Obama's demise.

We're not talking about the actual presidency, which has three years to run. We're talking about the illusions and promises we wrapped around him. Promises dashed, compromises made, fortune reversed. So much gone so soon.

We've got a president in a tailspin. His base is in revolt, his party in disarray. We've got a health care reform bill that has no reform left in it, and which even those who back it call "crap." We've got a Senate where one man (today it's Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska) holds his own party and president hostage to his demands. After months of razzle and dazzle, grandiose statements and even more grand cost estimates, lobbying, back-channel deals and jowling and cajoling, it's not certain today that the Senate will pass this mess of a bill by Christmas Day.

While Washington poses and pivots, the rest of the country, the real America, wonders where all the jobs are going and when credit will loosen up and when the drumbeat of economic bad news will stop. The people's anger and frustration are coming through loud and clear in grassroots protests and political polls. The president's approval ratings are tumbling day after day. Last week a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll said 46 percent of voters don't believe President Obama will be re-elected in 2012. Four days later, on Wednesday, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found his approval rating dropping to a new low of 50 percent. The next day, on Thursday, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed his approval rating at a new low of 47 percent, and even more startling, a survey suggests that the rowdy and rude anti-government Tea Party Movement enjoys more support than Democrats and Republicans.

What's most surprising about all this is how quickly the president lost the high ground, how quickly he lost his footing, and how quickly his own base turned against him.

This has left savvy political insiders in the Democratic Party wondering where things went wrong. A veteran Democratic political analyst who stays plugged into Washington from his perch in New York framed it for me very simply: Obama abandoned his vision, his promises, and his goals. "One, his vision of unity and bipartisanship went out the window early,'' he said. "He hasn't even kept the party united. Two, he didn't keep his promise to fight the lobbyists. Lobbyists are not only immersed in the health care bill, they are running it. Three, he gave in to opponents and let the Senate strip the health care bill of the things like public option that he had promised during his campaign. Four, he's bought into the conventional wisdom that says that a bad health care bill is better than nothing.''

A week that started with Sunday Bloody Sunday, when the Connecticut senator, Joseph Lieberman, jumped ship to everyone's shock, got only worse. Lieberman, in that didactic tone that can irritate the most temperate listener, announced on national television that he would not vote for the health care bill if it contained the public option provision (darling of liberals) and/or a Medicare extension to people 55 to 64. He won. Goodbye to the public option and Medicare extension. Then, the next day, Howard Dean, former Democratic presidential candidate and party chief, got on his high horse and, as is his wont, furiously called for the bill to be killed. Better dead than watered down was his thinking. The party went berserk.

Al Franken, the comedian who is now a Democratic senator from Minnesota, made a jerk of himself by cutting off Lieberman's statement on the Senate floor. Bill Clinton leaped into the fray, calling for passage of an imperfect bill rather than ending up empty-handed. Everything is unraveling. And that's where we are today.

And where's Obama? In Copenhagen, taking on China on climate change. Good luck!