The fact is if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill to end the bailouts cut spending and shrink the size and scope of government the only way to do all these things it is to put someone in the White House who won't veto any of these things.

Obama seemed poised to realign American politics after his stunning 2008 victory. But the economy remains worse than even the administration's worst-case scenarios and the long legislative battles over health care reform financial services reform and the national debt and deficit have taken their toll. Obama no longer looks invincible.

We all learn in school that the judicial legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy the media religious institutions and NGOs.

Health care reform the marquee legislative accomplishment of the Obama administration's first term was passed before we entered the world of divided government.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze inefficient incomprehensible and inaccessible.

Having yet another vote on refinery legislation that uses high oil prices as an excuse to weaken environmental protections and to give more legislative gifts to the oil industry is misguided in the extreme.

Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body - the producers and consumers themselves.