Barack Obama is maddening.  He does a good job of pissing off the left and the right royally, and his time in office represents an extremely mixed record. On health care you have to give Obama credit.  He went further in bringing comprehensive health care to every citizen in this country better than any president. By itself, this would take him far in placing him as a better than average president in American history.  And yet...

The last year or so of the Obama administration has been little short of a disaster.  Economists generally agree that the last thing that should be done to stimulate the economy is to cut spending and balance the budget during a recession, and yet Obama has  drunk the Kool Aid, focusing on deficit reduction far longer and harder than was healthy either for himself or the country.  And even the most passionate Obama supporter has to agree that the man's negotiation strategies recently have been abyssmal.  I said that if I was a criminal, and was expecting a 5 t0 10 year sentence and Obama was my lawyer, he'd probably make a deal with the DA to give me life in prison with no chance of parole.

Mr. Obama can be accused of shifting gears too slowly.  After all, his hands off strategy with Congress worked admirably with the health care bill, and he simply followed this approach too long in his wrangles with Congress over the budget and the deficit.    What Obama did and what Obama proposed may have made some sense in the 1960s or the 1980s. But of course, the culprits are the GOP and their Tea Party faction.

My take on the Tea Party is that their demographics have always been here in America, from the Know Nothing Party that elected Millard Fillmore, up to the Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan supporters.  Many of these  people live on the politics of resentment, and they've been assisted since the time of Ronald Reagan by the incremental policies of neoconservativism.  Frankly in my opinion, the right wing ideology has come pretty close to its most extreme moment.  And I believe that its long term future is unsustainable.  The problem is this unsustainable ideology is also deeply tied to an unsustainable economy.

Over the decades, taxes on the wealthy have been reduced. Tax breaks for corporations have increased while the social net has been cut. American jobs have been outsourced for the mantra of global trade.  In the process, a death star economy (as in Star Wars) has been created, where global integration funnels more and more money to the upper classes, who become stronger and stronger at the expense of everyone else.  But the downside of this is that the world economy has become more and more fragile, and more and more prone to disastrous mood swings.

We are in that state now. The world appears to be on the brink of a Great Depression II in the near future.  I've outlined some of the basics of the Chinese housing and financial bubble elsewhere, and the situation in Europe seems to me to just about be unsolvable.  It all feels like being on a runaway train with a broken bridge looming off in the distance.

 Our Tea Party brethren aren't making things any rosier, as their number one goal, according to Mitch McConnell, is that Obama should fail.  This is their obstensible drive for cutting government spending without raising any taxes. And so with the prospect of political stagnation in Washington, DC, it looks like the USA is doing its part to help make a triple economic disaster.

All of this should be obvious.  But I think that a more basic, fundamental mechanism is at work here, at least for America. And here, we have to get personal, both with Mr. Obama and his opponents.  Cornel West, the Harvard professor whom Obama had a beer with after his run-in with the Cambridge, MA police, has recently said that Obama is "the black mascot of Wall Street."  I think that too many people  miss this aspect of Obama's personality.

Disregarding the hype around his biography, the most formative influence in young Obama's life was his grandmother, who happened to be the most influential female banker in Hawaii. Because of his upper class background, Obama found it easy to go to only the best schools.  And in the world of Harvard and the University of Chicago, he hobnobbed with the ruling classes of finance, academia, and business. In this rarified social strata, personal character is based on achievement.  There is the feeling that the world is indeed, a color blind meritocracy.

Contrast this with the roots of the Tea Party. Find a person who is a white, older, small businessman who's had some financial reversals, and who's been a Republican for the last thirty years, and you'll find the Tea Party. They and the people they influence think that Ivy League intellectuals somehow feel that they're superior to the average car or tire dealer.  Their ire is fanned by the plutocrats who play them like finger puppets. To some extent, these people do have legitimate grievances. But beyond that, there is racism.

The fat, old jokesters at the country club and the Glenn Beck lovers are racist -- pure and simple. They may have found that their racism is less socially acceptable than it has been in the past, and so they make every effort to disguise it.  Code words have been substituted.  Causes like welfare "reform," anti-Muslim hysteria,  and Right to Life are substitutes for hatred of the Other. And when a black man actually became  president, the hatred of the Other had a new and juicy target after eight years of spinning wheel of hatred elsewhere.

When Obama pursued the spirit of bipartisanship far too long, perhaps he assumed that anyone who had achieved a certain level of power or influence in Washington, DC was a member of the upper class, playing by upper class rules.  He didn't take into account that people like Mitch McConnell or Eric Cantor represent Dixieland and its constituents with fond memories of the Confederacy.

To be sure, Obama is a consumate politician.  You don't get to be POTUS  without a huge amount of political skill (and with some luck). And one rises to the Oval Office in America by ultimately playing to the center.  His stirring 2004 Democratic Convention speech was really a call towards playing in the center.  Liberals fooled themselves completely into thinking otherwise.  And Obama played the "to the center" handbook right up until the deficit ceiling negotiations.

Here he had the rudest of awakenings, and it was rumored that he was deeply depressed afterwards.  Certainly, he wasn't expecting the almost universal condemnation from left, right, and center.  Surely he was stung by catcalls at his negotiating skills and other taunts. And so in his speech to the joint session of Congress, he came out swinging.

Interestingly enough, the current rounds of Obama's proposals still play to the center.  Obama has emphasized the fact that much of his proposals have been put forward by Republicans in the past.  And a closer examination of his proposals reveal that Obama has set a series of painful traps for his GOP opponents.  In exchange for taxing a $1,000,000 a year income earner only $39,000 a year more in taxes, Obama has included tax cuts for all workers and small business owners.  And all corporations will be able to write off 100% of all capital expenditures for 2012 if the Obama proposals are passed.

Will these proposals have a chance in Congress?  No.  But Obama now has some bully talking points to go to the voters next year. But other, bigger questions remain.  Will Obama stay angry?  I think the anwer is yes, as I'm begining to think he knows that part of his opposition is based on the fact that they don't like the color of his skin. Will this anger finally make him look more presidential than he's appeared in the past?  Yes.

And the biggest question of all is, will the voters stick with a national leader who channels legitimate anger at his opponents, people who are more than willing to watch the country go down in flames than to see a black man spend another four years in the White House?  Mind you, this would mean sticking with a president saddled with the most horrible world economics of anyone since Herbert Hoover.  Or will they insist on putting some pinhead from Texas into the vice presidency, if not the Oval Office?

Time will tell.