That being said, Obama needs to swallow his pride and move leftwards and adopt HOLC. It's still not too late to prefer We the People over Wall Street.

If someone could convince him that HOLC would be good for banks and bankers, he might be able to pull the trigger on it, but I don't think he has advisors who would do that.

Really, the president who couldn't put single-payer on the table, but has no problem putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the table, isn't going to get behind HOLC; even if it makes all kinds of economic sense, it's not helping the kinds of people he respects.

I can't believe what I'm hearing and seeing; we've got millions of people ready, willing, and able to take the fight to the forces of evil, be them political parties, banksters, or other assorted criminals,  and he`s in there negotiating the terms of surrender. Does he even realize he's the President of the United States of America? He's acting like a schoolboy whose been called up to the Vice-Principal's office. Is there no limit to the humiliation he's willing to subject himself to, and by proxy, us?

I've wondered out loud here, and elsewhere, whether there's "something wrong" with Obama. It's either that or begin preparing ourselves for the real possibility that he's simply a coward. Is this his "Waterloo?"  Up until the Presidency he's, and I don't know a better term for it, conned his way to all his "successes." And now that it's no longer a game of skipping from one lily pad to the next on his way up the ladder, Bam! He wakes up, and realizes, "Holy Sh!t! What just happened? I'm the President? Oh.....my...God."

He's still living in bi-partisan dream land. It's the only thing he knows.

You're right, of course, about HOLC. Millbank's generally right about the economy and respect for working class voters - which, btw, I have a thing or two to discuss, since I spent about 6 months in working class HRC networks. Never, since I started organizing in the mid-90s, have I run into such well informed voters as I did along the Rio Grande, and elsewhere is various working class areas. They had specific policy reasons for voting, one of the biggest of which, you, BTD, dismissed: health care. They voted for a clear-eyed policy with three simple legs, not gobbledygook. They supported sound economic policy, which, as here with HOLC, has been discussed. But they also had a clear understanding that Obama's ed policies were Bush III, well before the NEA verbalized it. (Wait for that to hit the fan, for another wave of confession and remorse, BTW). Smart voters, way smarter than the cool kids in superior entitled classes. Health care, the economy, education. Their thinking was deadly, and they were shunned from the party because they, actual voters, were such a threat.

Ever wonder why the party and the press strained to ignore the Hispanic voting bloc, or that the bloc voted by 70/30 (as you did an excellent job illuminating at the time) identically with the working class of all other non-AA ethnicities? Here in the Southwest, we got whiplash going from being the future of the party to being stuffed in a basement.

The thing the party and the lib blogosphere needs to ask themselves is why the base was so right, without simply dismissing their rock solid predictions as "dumb." After all, it's not like they got much honest information from a party or national media who tried to drown opposing viewpoints with a tsunami of bias. Why? Why were those dumb hicks and Bunkers, Brazile's unnecessary working class whites and Hispanics so much smarter that the Creative Class?

That's what any competent organization would reflect on as a rational lessons-learned postmortem. I've never seen a successful organization that couldn't handle this kind of process.

One of the dumber things we do is speculation how a different President may have acted if they had been in President Obama's place. No one knows.

But some people were telling the rest of us rubes that there was not a dime of difference between Obama and Clinton policy-wise, and that he will have a better chance of getting things accomplished since he was a media darling.