Great letter, ArtWrite. Direct speak, representing the madder-but- wiser of us who BELIEVED that a Democratic majority led by an intelligent president would guarantee Change We Can Believe In.
You have identified an interesting option in 2010 and 2012 that I, for one, had not considered: voting Green which, in these particular elections, might be winnable, if our choices come down toa fundamentalist Republican candidate (can there be any other kind?) and a Democratic candidate whose lustre might, by then, be irrevocably tarnished if he does not promote the legislation and decisions for which we elected him.
I'm curious: do you feel any differently than you did about Hillary Clinton? I'm only beginning to ask myself that question....

The country is already down the toilet. Now that they have the chance, they're doing nothing to fix it. Do they not understand why they won in 2006 and 2008? Not so they could cower under their desks, afraid that making the wrong move--making any move--could spell the end of their careers. If I did my job like that, I would have been fired years ago. I'm done with voting for Democrats because the alternative is worse. Inertia is as bad as the wrong action.

Matt Taibbi on the prospects for the bill:

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, or anyone else. If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (ie the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing. Personally, I think they’re doing a lousy job even of that. I lauded Roddick for playing out the string with heart, and giving a good show. But these Democrats aren’t even pretending to give a shit, not really. I mean, they’re not even willing to give up their vacations.

This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency.

Emphasis mine. The first paragraph is crucial, if crudely phrased. If Obama and Rahm wanted this to get done, it would get done.