defend the ineffectual political bargaining techniques of the Obama Administration and criticizing activists for not being sufficiently supportive of feeble Obama policy initiatives.

Where to start on how and in how many ways this approach was wrong and doomed to create political failure? To begin with, he concedes that he did NOT ever present a plan based in a pragmatic assessment of what needed to be done to solve the actual problems created by our health system. His ONLY plan was to give the Republicans everything he THOUGHT they wanted -- and leave it to them to accept or reject it. Of course they were going to reject it, and run against it. Because there was no political upside to them doing otherwise. First of all health care reform was and is meaningless to their affluent base of supporters. Secondly, if they had wanted to pass any of the useless half measures and industry giveaways they've been proposing for 50 years in response to progressive attempts at creating universal health care, they could and would have done it when they held the Presidency and the legislature.

All the President's strategy achieved was forcing his fellow Democrats into a position where they were left holding the bag for bad Republican ideas. And then, follow that with whining about the Republican's failure to support their own measures -- as if that would somehow win him political points.

Have we ever seen anyone at this political level more naive? Unlike what many insisted during the campaign, Obamas political and governing inexperience has turned out to be a serious problem in these troubled times.

After one of the primary debates I asked a friend, a pretty high powered business executive, what she thought. She said, "I think Hillary looked like a CEO and Obama looked like a Vice President."

Actually, the government has already spent their money. Every year the Treasury has borrowed the surplus revenue collected by Social Security and spent the money on other purposes--whatever presidents and Congress decide, including more tax cuts for monied interests. The Social Security surplus thus makes the federal deficits seem smaller than they are--around $200 billion a year smaller. Each time the government dipped into the Social Security trust fund this way, it issued a legal obligation to pay back the money with interest whenever Social Security needed it to pay benefits.

That moment of reckoning is approaching. Uncle Sam owes these trillions to Social Security retirees and has to pay it back or look like just another deadbeat. That risk is the only "crisis" facing Social Security. It is the real reason powerful interests are so anxious to cut benefits. Social Security is not broke--not even close. It can sustain its obligations for roughly forty years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, even if nothing is changed. Even reports by the system's conservative trustees say it has no problem until 2041 (that report is signed by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the guy who bailed out the bankers). During the coming decade, however, the system will need to start drawing on its reserve surpluses to pay for benefits as boomers retire in greater numbers.

But if the government cuts the benefits first, it can push off repayment far into the future, and possibly forever. Otherwise, government has to borrow the money by selling government bonds or extend the Social Security tax to cover incomes above the current $107,000 ceiling. Obama endorses the latter option.