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Is alcoholism. In the very depth of the problems that alcohol creates, as the alcoholic's world is crashing down around him, the defining question is, does the alcoholic reach for more booze? Or does he find the courage and resolve to pour it out and reach for something different? And how far down the alcoholic goes before making that decision determines whether he'll even live to make it to the other side, and how much of his life will still be there when he gets there.
The American economy is addicted to finance, and modern civilization is addicted to carbon. The sooner these habits are broken, the more life there will be left for us on the other side. The longer we wait, the more we will have destroyed, the more opportunities we will have missed, and the poorer we shall be.
That conveys the real costs of Obama's failure to depart from the status quo. Frequently when people complain that Obama isn't being as transformational as they would like, my internal response is "well, he always was just a politician, and he promised a few specific agenda items, not to be your fantasy philosopher-king." Which may be an obnoxious thing to think, but he did promise health care and climate change, not to be the progressive pony president. But this analogy makes evident the costs of his failure. Failing to really challenge the financial sector doesn't just mean that the status quo continues in that respect, which sounds harmless enough; it means that the problems that are killing us continue apace, sabotaging everything else we and he might try to do. Health care reform in a society that is otherwise failing starts to look like less a generational achievement and more a booby prize. A failure to engage the central problems of our day becomes less a politician confining himself to politics, and more a leader who won't lead.
The extent to which financialization and hyperconsumption really are destroying this country becomes the extent to which Obama really is failing to touch the problems from which all problems flow. I see room to waver on just how bad our situation is, and therefore just how inadequate normal politics is to these times. But the argument that he's really truly failing, which I hadn't appreciated before, is made clear by the alcoholic-who-will-change-everything-but-the-alcohol metaphor.