Photo illo: Ed Johnson.

Having won a (temporary) victory in our now-endless budget battle, President Obama is now free to pursue the agenda that he’s laid out for his second term. As gleaned from various statements and media interviews, this includes: securing our withdrawal from Afghanistan, passing immigration reform, doing something about global climate change, doing something about gun control, “stabilizing” and “growing” the economy, fixing our infrastructure, making us energy independent and, of course, education.

Sorry, that sound you just heard was America’s head hitting the desk.

Mr. Obama could not possibly have put forward these proposals in any more obscure a manner, or with any less eloquence or passion. The president’s disdain for practical politics is already legend; his general disposition now seems to be devolving into somnambulism. Surely, no Democratic president since Grover Cleveland—and very few presidents, period—has staked out a less ambitious agenda for his second term. The stuff on the list that sounds good will never get done, and the rest doesn’t much matter.

Immigration reform is the one possible exception, as Republicans belatedly realize their party is demographically doomed if they don’t start catering to more than aged white American males.

Afghanistan is already history, an unpopular war in a dreadful place. Our exit will be messy no matter how it’s finessed, and the locals will immediately revert to their second-favorite occupation, killing each other.

Infrastructure repair is a fine idea, and a badly needed one. It’s dead-on-arrival with House Republicans, due to its “second stimulus” appearance. Don’t take the Tappan Zee.

Education reform is the mashed potatoes of politics, a meaningless mass that always looks good on the plate. “A better economy” is the big fat pat of butter you plop in the middle of the mashed potatoes. Gun control of any kind will be blocked by the right wing in Congress. President Obama was never able to summon much passion for the subject, and every day the horrors of Sandy Hook recede further into the blur of a dozen previous such atrocities.

Mr. Obama did some marginally good things about climate change in his first term—a high-speed rail line here, higher mileage standards for Detroit there—but overall, he’s never displayed much enthusiasm on this subject, either. For starters, doing anything about the climate will run smack into his stated desire for “energy independence,” which is now defined as a full-throttle, stunningly irresponsible orgy of deep-water oil drilling, fracking and—oh yeah, my favorite—“clean coal.” The president barely mentioned global warming during the campaign. He then set a speed record in cutting the throat of his own “priority” by citing the lack of any will to make the “tough political choices” necessary to save the world, claiming that “I’m pretty certain” no consensus exists in Washington on the subject, and adding—just in case we didn’t get the point—that “This one’s hard.”

Ah, so it is. Seems not so long ago that we had a president who told us, “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

No more. Mr. Obama is not formally a part of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), but over the last four years, he has proven himself to be a de facto member of that runaway conservative caucus, filling his cabinet with veterans from the administration of the last DLC president, Bill Clinton, who’ve been filling his mind with their ideas. And like them, he has served mostly as a manager of decline, of America’s retreat from what it was and what it can be in the world.

Ever since the Civil War, the Republicans have been the truly radical party in America, the Democrats the conciliators. For better or worse, Republicans have embraced or fomented ideas—abolition, suffrage, Social Darwinism, laissez-faire economics, progressivism, prohibition, modern conservatism—that have challenged and divided the country, and pushed it into brave new worlds.

Democrats have generally tried to reconcile and explain Americans to each other. Sometimes this has been a really bad idea—such as trying to appease Southern slave owners, or later the Klan—while often it has meant accepting immigrants, or co-opting and bringing into the political mainstream ideas like populism, civil rights, the labor movement, feminism and gay rights.

The rise of the DLC—whose ideas now dominate the leadership of the Democratic party, if not its rank and file—represented something else altogether, a capitulation to the basic premises of Reaganism, the latest radical Republican idea.

As a result, both parties have now presided over a generation-long decline of the middle and working classes—something unprecedented in American history. Since the start of the 1980s, income and living standards for most Americans have declined, wages have lagged far behind rises in productivity, the public sector and workers’ rights have been steadily whittled away, and the disparity between the very wealthy and the rest of us has reverted to 1920s levels. The industrial base has been increasingly converted to a finance-based economy, which has led to a regular series of debilitating financial crashes—the savings and loan debacle, the tech boom bust, the market meltdown of 2008—that have further squandered our national wealth.

The Democrats have proven to be the most scrupulous stewards of this new shrinking America—shrinking not just in economic size but in vision and ambition—as Reaganism itself has proven to be a hollow gong and Republicans’ latest bold radical ideas have blasted off into the la-la lands of Ayn Rand, creationism and government by the gun, for the gun, of the gun. The traveling freak show the party trotted out for last year’s presidential primaries was probably enough right there to turn much of the country back to Obama, and understandably so.

Yet the Republican accusation hurled at the president throughout the campaign (inchoate and misdirected though it often was) that he was merely presiding over decline held some validity.

Mr. Obama and his DLC allies see no real role for either a working class or a public sector in the America of the future. It’s why their meat is financial crises and complex fiscal “bargains.” As President Obama has also repeatedly signaled, some of the things he’s willing to trim to achieve “economic stability” in these negotiations are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits—likely with the idea of, someday, privatizing them altogether.

Obama & Co. pride themselves on being “pragmatists” in making such deals, and have no patience for outsider movements of any kind, even those peopled mostly by their own constituents.

Stopping climate change is, for them, pie-in-the-sky stuff, because it doesn’t have the votes. But like many people who pride themselves on their practicality, Mr. Obama can’t see the forest for the toppled trees. The $60 billion or so our local representatives are now trying to squeeze out of Congress is intended to patch up exactly one storm. It’s also a year’s worth of the new tax revenues the administration just had such a struggle squeezing out of the rich. So much for climate change’s irrelevance to the future.

When it comes to America, you might as well try to do the hard thing.

editorial@observer.com

It would also be the wrong move at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.

Job creation and economic growth in New York remain stagnant at best. Upstate, where decades of Rust Belt decay have ravaged city and town alike, unemployment and underemployment have become a way of life for far too many people.

A hike in the minimum wage very likely would make matters worse, despite the best intentions of the proposal’s supporters. Would-be employers will think twice about hiring entry-level employees, and that’s the last thing anybody wants in this economy.

There’s no question that those who live on minimum wage salaries have it tough. Rising prices have eroded the purchasing power of nearly a million and a half New Yorkers who work minimum wage jobs.

That said, state economic policy should have one single priority this year: job creation. Too many New Yorkers, especially in the western and northern parts of the state, are out of work or are working part-time. Albany has to figure out policies that will spur the creation of good, permanent, well-paying jobs. Tinkering with the minimum wage at a time of economic stagnation could easily result in job destruction, rather than job creation.

The Democrats’ bill would also tie increases in the minimum wage to the inflation rate. That, too, is bound to inhibit the creation of entry-level jobs and summer jobs for teens. Such increases might be justified when times are more prosperous, but they can be destructive when job creation is so stagnant. The bill’s supporters rightly argue that minimum wage increases over the years have not kept up with inflation. The question is whether this is the right time for a raise.

With job creation so weak, the answer has to be no.

Parks & Recreation: Fan favorite for Commie Liberals!

Are you surprised that New Yorker publications love liberal TV? Not really? That's okay, it's still interesting to read up on the Experian-Simmons survey that measured consumer's TV preferences against their political ideology and then spat out a bunch of shows that determine how liberal or conservative you are. Surprisingly (not surprisingly), most New York media favor the programs only watched by people who voted for Obama and support green initiatives.

For example: Liberals love "sarcastic" comedies like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Office (so basically all those flailing in Thursday night ratings), along with The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (But also: Cougar Town? Raising Hope?)  Those left-leaners were also more likely to be fans of Treme, spend the mornings watching The View and late-night watching Letterman, Conan, or Craig Ferguson.

If you want to see what Conservatives watch (hint: You might be a Republican if you like Leno or Mythbusters), you can check out the incomplete list here.

But more importantly! Comparing this list against two years of New York Magazine's TV picks -- Emily Nussbaum's "Year In TV" last December and Vulture's "Top 10 TV shows of 2011," you'll find 9 instances of overlap (with Community and Parks and Recreations counted twice for each year) with liberal favorites. Only one show --ABC's The Middle--landed as an outlier, as the survey said that it was a favorite of both liberals and conservatives. Time magazine's roundup of best shows in past two years had 3 liberal TiVo'd shows and 0 conservatives.

The Daily Beast had three lib-favorites  in 2010 (their 2011 "Top TV" list isn't up), though they lose Progressive Points for putting Glee in their "Worst" list. The New York Times' 2010 list only had one show on their list that fit the criteria of liberal bias: Treme...but another zero for conservative favorites.

So what does this prove? Mostly that New Yorkers are nonpartisan: the survey didn't even list Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Dexter, Friday Night Lights, or The Good Wife in either Conservative or Liberal fan favorites, but they consistently  showed up on every single list we looked at. (So did Parks & Recreation and Community, which were on the lib's list.) When it comes to TV politics, it seems, NYC media is just too cool for either party.

It’s time for them to stop talking to us and to engage each other in the spirit of cooperation that the President cited in his presentation. The ideologues in both parties are not going to be happy with the final result, since they are invested in dogma, not compromise. The Tea Party types on the Republican side would rather see the nation slip into default to prove a point. The entitlement-loving lefties on the Democratic side would rather look the other way as the nation continues to spend far beyond its means.

Either way, people are going to be unhappy. That is the nature of compromise.

So it is incumbent on leaders to lead, not to calculate, not to maneuver, not to grandstand. If the nation does default on Aug. 2, chances are good that the American public will pin the blame on both parties, rather than identify a single villain. Voters simply are not engaged enough in Beltway politics to sort out the details of the debt ceiling. All they know—and, frankly, this is the root of the matter—is that their elected representatives seem incapable of governing. That’s bad for all concerned.

It is instructive to compare the paralysis in Washington with the energy exhibited in Albany over the past seven months. In New York, a governor and leaders of the state legislature understood that the vitality of state government depended on tackling, rather than evading, hard issues. They did so through negotiation and compromise.

It is a measure of changing times that Albany can now teach Washington a thing or two about governance.

It’s time for the Beltway crowd to stop giving speeches. We already know what’s at stake. If the worst happens, there will be plenty of blame to spread around.

Last week state senators Jeffrey D. Klein of the Bronx, Diane Savino of Staten Island, David Carlucci of Rockland County and David Valesky of upstate Oneida County announced the formation of their own mini-caucus in the Legislature's upper house. That means they have seceded from the Democratic Senate conference, led by the discredited John Sampson of Brooklyn.

Senator Sampson and his colleagues presided over an ethical circus from 2008 to last year. Mr. Sampson and others were connected to those who sought to wire a lucrative contract to convert Aqueduct racetrack to a so-called "racino." The Democratic caucus empowered people like Hiram Monserrate and Pedro Espada Jr. to assume powerful posts-and both became instant scandals, bringing disgrace and embarrassment to an institution not known for its sense of shame. 

The Senate changed hands in November earlier this month when Republicans reasserted their control of the body. That change was not accompanied by a shake-up of the Democratic leadership in the Senate. Mr. Sampson is now the Senate's minority leader.

The four rebel senators decided that they have had enough of their colleagues' antics. They will vote independently, not subject to Mr. Sampson's dictates. They promise that their actions will bring change to Albany.

It's a small start. But it's a start all the same.