When I traveled to Washington, D.C., to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama as Decider-in-Chief, the feelings of possibility and change were palpable. They coursed through the National Mall, providing for the mammoth crowd a kind of insulation against January’s bitter cold and, perhaps, against a belief that this country might very well be fucked no matter who’s in charge of it. People openly wept, hugging and hi-fiving, hopeful. A beautiful thing to be a part of, I must admit, because it seemed as though a change was finally going to come. Granted it was an amorphous notion of change; a mysterious, Rorschach-blot that — like the then-candidate — took the form of whatever you wanted it to be. But it was there, this changeyness, and it was nice.

Yet America’s perpetual-fucktitude (something I was willing to set aside that day as well as the next several dozen after it) has, like a resurgent tumor, resurfaced with a vengeance. There are plenty of reasons to choose from: Obama’s Bush-like commitment to the war in Afghanistan; the potentially illegal goings-on at Bagram Airfield, aka Guantamo Bay 2.0; his adherence to outdated and failed ideas regarding “The War on Drugs;” his Goldman Sachs-infested Treasury Department and their subsequent rape of the American taxpayer; historic records of joblessness and income inequality; and now, his apparent “waffling” on a public health care option.

Maybe my renewed sense of disappointment has something to do with watching cable news earlier today. The Big Story has been the aforementioned White House/Dem. leadership waffling on a public option, which is indispensable viz. sucessfully reforming the entire system that we regard as “health care.” An NBC poll released today finds that a narrow majority of Americans, 47-percent, oppose such an option, as opposed to the 42-percent who favor it. In a follow-up question, another narrow majority (48-percent) believed “a public option would reduce access to their choice of doctors, and would lower costs by limiting medical treatment options.” [UPDATE: This poll is full of shit, which further illustrates how impossible it is to know anything about anything]

These people are wrong. Why? Well … do they have a cable service provider? In a largely uneducated country like America, what people don’t know only serves the vested interests of the status quo. It is not a conspiracy. There is no Bavarian Illuminati at work here. There is only the transaction of money between special interests, lobbyists and politicians amidst a media environment that couldn’t offer an honest debate between Pepsi versus Coke if it tried, occurring in the dumbest, unhealthiest and most violent Western industrialized nation in the world.

It says a lot about our decision-making abilities, I think, to watch Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, pull out a fucking “chart” emblazoned with the Debt & Deficit Dragon and realize that his side is winning the health care debate. But I suppose it’s nothing new: Colin Powell had plenty of charts when he sought UN authorization for military force in Iraq. By that metric, if we’re going to bomb innocent people halfway across the world, then we’d better have some goddamned numbers — even if those numbers are wrong. Yet when it comes to destroying a chance to imitate the successful health care programs of other, healthier, smarter nations, all we need is a cartoon dragon? Really? Are we six years old? Jeezus…

But who can really blame us? When you Google “health care reform facts” you get nearly 5 million results. For the average American Idol-watching American, keeping up with the minutia is an overwhelming feat; to root through and discover who’s lying to you (nearly every one), who isn’t, and whether or not the President is really a vampire socialist who wants to kill your grandmother for her sweet, delicious plasma — much less whether or not he’s actually an American vampire instead of a Kenyan one.

Like that sense of change that now feels like it’s slipping away, Obama’s characteristic centrism and aura of “I am what what you want me to be” may, ultimately, be his undoing; as William Greider writes in The Nation:

Barack Obama mainly did this to himself. To avoid the accusation of socialized medicine, he intentionally shrouded his objectives in bureaucratic euphemisms like “public option.” What the hell does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything. The vagueness allowed anyone to fill in the blanks and anxious people did so in apocalyptic ways. The original idea, after all, was making something similar to Medicare available to anyone between childhood and old age who was either shut out by high prices or abused by insurance companies policing the system. This approach–call it Medicare Basic–would in theory give government the greater leverage needed to control the price inflation and reshape the system in positive ways. If you told people “public option” was a Medicare equivalent, the polls would demonstrate the popularity. Instead, that objective is now at risk. The right still calls Obama a covert socialist.

There is a more cynical interpretation of Obama’s flexibility. He is coming out right about where he wanted to be. Forget the good talk, it is said, this president never really intended to do deep reform that truly alters the industrial power structure dominating our dysfunctional healthcare system. He just wanted minimalist reforms he could sell as “victory.” Not until years later would people figure out that nothing fundamental had been changed.

We’ve come a long way from January, baby.