Dear Eleanor;

[BDBoop]

As the great lady once said, "Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

When a President is caught in a "damned if he does, damned if he doesn't" vise—as President Obama was during the debt ceiling crisis—it's tempting not to let him go. The right wing certainly feels that way, but the discourse on the left seems to be on the same track.

Maybe it's possible to raise the level of the discussion. One way is to see that the level of the solution isn't found on the same as the level of the problem. Obama has taken that view as his long-term strategy. His position is that acrimonious divisions in government, the problem, can't be solved by being even more acrimonious. His call for compromise, balance and a reasoned approach to our difficult challenges is a sane adult's way of rising above the level of the problem.

His adversaries on the right love this strategy because they have succeeded with distortion and demagoguery for a long time. In their view, acting like an adult is the same as showing weakness and in essence throwing away the game. By contrast, the left resents his strategy because they want to pound back at the right wing, getting in their licks while they have the chance. It seems to be the conventional wisdom at this particularly volatile moment to believe that the only person who is blind to his mistakes is the President himself.

In many ways the facts are on his side, but emotions aren't. We were saved from a second Great Depression; the auto industry was put back on its feet; progressive policies were implemented on many fronts that steadily began the grueling work of undoing thirty years of reactionary indoctrination. Yet there's no doubt that many cherished expectations were dashed. The rich still have their unjust tax cuts; the public option in health care wasn't enacted.

Read more: Why the Obama strategy may work

Good article for gaining perspective, and dare I say it; maybe even a paradigm shift?

I can dream, can't I?