The President and Vice-President have it right.

[Vernon Windsor]

Both president Obama and vice-president Biden have been taken to task in the media for comments urging their political base (questionable assumption) to get to the polls for the mid-term elections. Speaking as a person who has been called plenty of names (often from speeding cars), and who has been admonished from time to time, I don't think either man was talking down to Democratic voters. They were simply speaking the truth. To elect to roll over and let the opposition sweep the mid-termsis extraordinarily irresponsible. To expect the Obama (or any other administration) to turn the economy around in two years after the shock it sustained is ridiculous. Even more so while winding down one war and sustaining another.

Some progressives are feeling stung by the frustration of the administration in having to explain to the base why it is stupid to yield more advantage to the Republican tea party two years into its first term. Why? If the shoe fits, wear it, otherwise get in there and take care of business. My own expression of frustration at people who think that two years is too long to wait for significant change, would be far more harsh than that of either Biden or Obama. I would remind these people what others have had to endure to effect change—beatings, lynchings, forced relocations, cultural genocide, terrorism where law enforcement turns a blind eye to the plight of the victims, and redistricting to disenfranchise whole communities. Now these folks want to "take their marbles and go home" rather than fight for what they claimed to believe in, because they didn't get everything they wanted in the first two years?

I have a word for that. You can guess, if you want to.

Change is hard. Economies the size of the United States, rarely turn on a dime, and certainly don't when the citizens of the nation are not working in concert. All the talking heads complain, but none of them have the answers—only speculation. The Republicans have issued a "Pledge to America" without any specifics of how they will reconcile the numbers of borrowing 700 billion dollars to give tax cuts to the wealthiest 2%. These are the same people who produced a "budget" with no numbers in it. And pissed off progressives are ready to relinquish the mid-terms to these people? Give me a break!

Either you're serious about change or you're not. If you're not, get the hell out of the way. If you are, you know what to do—and you'll probably do it.