But by ending the year with a bipartisan-compromise tax deal, Obama showed he is capable of delivering the kind of change that was supposed to be the hallmark of his Administration.

Indeed-- I bet a lot of people watching Obama during the 2008 campaign were thinking, "I hope he doesn't mean it when he says he'll get rid of those tax breaks for the wealthy."

More Halperinian analysis:

To avoid seeing the economy stall again, the president needs to demonstrate that he has a strategy for centrist governance when Republicans take control of the House of Representatives in January. Political nihilists on the right and left may find the notion of swallowing something that their opponents want antithetical to their mind-set. But Obama's ability to compromise will prove crucial. Here's a simple rule for him: If a proposal is denounced by both Nancy Pelosi and Sarah Palin, it will probably find support in the center of the electorate.

Here's a simple test for that simple rule: What kinds of policy ideas would result from applying the Palin/Pelosi principle? (Torturing puppies would apparently be a sure-fire electoral winner--since Pelosi and Palin would presumably both denounce this.) Of course, defining the "center" in this way is absurd; repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell is broadly popular, for instance, but it outrages Palinesque Republicans. So it's not centrist, according to the Halperin rule. Unfortunately, a lot of Beltway journalists see the world this way.

It's a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs.

Shudder!  Luckily, Pelosi and co.'s world seems to have diverged from ours around 2003, when the normal retirement age budged up two months, further budging by the same amount until 2008, when it reached 66 years. It's currently scheduled to begin budging again in 2021, until it budges up to 67 in 2026.

In sharp contrast to Pelosi's horrifying dystopia, where such budges are considered unthinkable, in our universe they are so routine that even some people who write about politics for a living seem completely unaware of them.

That could happen on the federal level. Already Nancy Pelosi and her far-left crew want to raise the top federal tax rate to 45 percent. That's not capitalism. That's Fidel Castro stuff, confiscating wages that people honestly earn.

Setting aside the truth of the charge against Pelosi, Fidel Castro must have been the president of the United States in 1982-86, when the top rate was 50 percent. Or maybe all of the 1970s, when it was 70 percent. Or from 1950-63, when it was 91 percent.

compare (a) the way that a single anonymous person's comparison of Bush and Hitler swamped our political discourse and forever altered the image of MoveOn with (b) what the (non)-reaction will be to the identical comparison coming from the leader of the Republican Party who spouts his hate-mongering to an audience of 15 million people. Within that comparison one finds many central truths about how our political debates and media discussions function.

Looking beyond how corporate media pilloried Democratic activist group MoveOn over user-submitted (and never-published) video, Greenwald gives a maddeningly extensive history of corporate media compliance with right-wingers' Nazi smears, and simultaneous reprobation of even spurious such instances from the left.

See the FAIR Action Alert: "When Are Nazi Comparisons Deplorable?: For Fox News, Only When Republicans Are the Target" (1/16/04).