Okay, so let me get this straight. We are supposed to forget the “finer points i.e. what Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Rutledge, Madison, Paine, etc honed down to the essence of democracy and instead rely on somebody who just won’t embarrass us and somebody who wants to negotiate rather than dictate? How thin our sense of democracy has become. So for trying to make a silk purse out of sow's ear (rationalizing/weaseling out of his early choice), Cesca gets a C. For not having done his reporting homework in the first place, as a journalist he gets a D. Cesca should have checked out how Obama felt about these "finer points" of the core of liberalism as worked out with great personal cost by our framers. He might have discovered a very conservative Chicago politician who liked Reagan both in substance and in style. As for the big picture i.e. the title of this piece, this may be the Summer of Awful for the better off, but it has been 30 years of the awful insidious rise of disaster capitalism for most people and above all for democracy. It isn't about Bush and Cheney. It's about a corrupt and awful economic system that has devoured our democracy. Cesca gets it all wrong. He figures we can ignore "the finer points" of our constitution and economic folly for some idea that a Chicago politician can keep fast talking us and the world to accept this system that Sheldon Wolin calls "inverted totalitarianism" in his new book "Democracy Incorporated". Or we should just endure what Naomi Klein calls "The Shock Doctrine" as we succumb here at home to the rise of disaster capitalism. And that Cesca actually says we need to "keep our powder dry" is proof positive for me that socially liberal conservatives have completely taken over the Democratic Party and hope to silence the ongoing argument of the founding brothers between, as Jefferson put it, "aristocrats and democrats" i.e. those who believe in a few powerful people running things in a back room and those who believe in the will and mostly wisdom of the crowd.