"Sire, the peasants are revolting!"

"You said it, they stink on ice!"

Digby and others suggest that the biggest political conflicts in the near future will be within the 2 parties rather than between them. The establishments of both parties want nothing more than to preserve the status quo. They are both on corporate payrolls and the last thing that either side wants to do is to piss off the people who sign the checks. Both parties are facing increasingly angry bases who can no longer be bought off with anodyne warm fuzzies from expensive public relations firms. She writes in part;

As average folks without a lot of institutional juice, we citizens don't have a whole lot of options. So we do what we can. But there is one thing we should all probably recognize and deal with: the president, the congress and the media of both parties are all in agreement about one thing: they do not like the rabble at both ends of the spectrum making demands. Remember, it's their town.
And I include the president in that for a reason. It's not a matter of him "miscalculating" or failing to understand the nature of the opposition. He, like all establishment politicians, has an interest in maintaining the status quo, and I would imagine that the fear among all establishment politicians is that this phenomenon might actually bring about real change (as opposed to the fluffy, Madison Avenue version they like to sell.) After all, the president has large majorities and a huge amount of power. It's hard to believe that if he wanted to get real health care reform passed that he couldn't do it. It's not 1994 and the Republicans aren't in ascendance and dominating the discourse. It's not outrageous to make the obvious assumption that he's not doing it for the simple reason that he doesn't want to. And it's not ridiculous to think that one of the reasons for that is that it would empower the base of the Democratic Party and inflame the base of the GOP. At this moment that particular problem appears to be the biggest threat to the permanent political establishment of both parties there is.

If Obama is not going to lead and his promise of "change" is nothing more than political valium, then perhaps we should all consider taking matters into our own hands. I'm not calling for armed revolution. I leave that to the right wing crazies. Rather, I think we should begin to think and act independently of party establishments and create our own "facts on the ground."