Surveying the field of potential Republican presidential candidates for 2012 it looked as though there was only one serious contender to President Obama’s re-election chances, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Bright, ambitious, articulate, experienced as a congressman and a governor, Jindal looked to be in pole position to take over his floundering party. His competition, the inflatable Ken doll Mitt Romney, Christian Whacko Mike Huckabee and the mentally incontinent Sarah Palin, are all poised to be blown past by anyone who can speak in complete sentences and not make 75% of the country laugh out loud. Jindal looked to be the Porsche in the race of Ford Fiestas…until last night’s nationally televised “coming out party,” his rebuttal to President Obama’s first major speech before the congressional joint session. Instead of looking like the future of the Republican Party, Jindal fumbled the ball in embarrassing fashion and served himself up as a main course to be feasted upon by the Jon Stewarts, Bill Mahers, Steven Colberts and SNL’s of the world who have been so starved for material of late. From his ill-advised entrance, where he sashayed like an American Idol contestant about to embarrass himself with a Madonna number, and his stilted teleprompter reading, to the laughably outdated content of his speech, Jindal looked more like a guy running for student body president than national office. In a word, “lightweight.” He’s “the Beav” of the party.

Small men have never had an easy time in American politics. With the sole exception of George McGovern, the taller man has never lost a presidential election. By walking to the podium last night, with his suit unbuttoned, the thin, diminutive governor looked like he still shops in the Boys Department and made Micheal Dukakis look like Mike Tyson. Optics are not everything, of course, and once in place, a good showing on the speech would have been redemptive. Instead, he did the one thing you can’t do in American politics- read folksy. Folksy is very effective, as Sarah Palin’s popularity attests, but it can’t be read from a teleprompter. “Aw shucks” stories about the local sheriff or the lady in the diner have to come across authentically which takes a skill that, to put it generously, Mr. Jindal needs to work on. And, given that he is the son of immigrants from India, and that his main audience is the lilly-white Republican base, he’ll need twice as much skill to make folksy work. It won’t be easy for him to wear safety goggles or to hold a can of Pabst and spit chewing tobacco without looking ridiculous.

But the most surprising thing was the actual speech itself. Instead of an up-and-comer who was going to re-invent what is clearly a broken party, Jindal simply trotted out the same old hackneyed Republican dog and pony show- government off our backs, less regulation, tax cuts as the salvation, etc. Instead of new leadership and vision it’s as though Jindal has either not been paying attention or he just thinks that same ol’ bullshit will sell over and over. It will, of course, with the Limbaugh base but 15% of the population won’t win nationally. The most likely plan simmering in his wee little brain is simply to push all his chips out onto the table, including passing on some of the stimulus money, and bet that he can point to the inevitable boondoggle and claim it was all a failure and a waste of money. It’s a gambit to counter the devastating reality that, for the second time in the last hundred years a Democrat has had to marshall the forces of the government to save Republican capitalism from itself. To do this, he is also betting that his communication skills will prove better than Barack Obama’s. Good luck with that Bobby…

The calculus for this latest cabinet debacle for the Obama Administration is easy enough to understand. With so much else going on, and with Commerce Secretary being such a B List gig, after the other fiascoes they just needed to put a warm body into the seat and New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg fit the bill. A thoroughly undistinguished senator finishing up his third thoroughly undistinguished term is just the sort of non-entity that makes for a good pick. The Administration fills a tedious spot no one wants and the schmuck gets to work in the White House and look like a big shot. Win-win, you’d think. Except for one thing. Gregg is a Republican. As has become nakedly obvious, the Republican Party has drawn a line in the sand and is throwing all of its might to avoid anyone crossing over to join the Obama party. There is little they can do to stop someone like Robert Gates or Ray LaHood, men of stature and reputation, from joining Obama’s cabinet, but a sadsack like Gregg was easy. Gregg’s explanation today, claiming that his “philosophical difference” was too great to overcome was truly laughable. Really? As if this wouldn’t have been the first topic on the table from the first minute this came up? That’s getting out of a pool by complaining that it’s wet in there.

What we do know is that the reason Gregg was considered in the first place was because he “reached out” to the Administration. We know this not only because Obama’s Press Secretary said it today, but because there is literally no other way Gregg would have shown up on the radar. He had clearly, and wisely, decided he was not going to run again to keep his senate seat in a state turning more blue every minute and rounding out his career in the cabinet probably sounded like a nice finish. So he made the phone calls. The folks on the other side of the phone, after looking his name up in the senate guide to see who he was, and who had just been so burned by Daschle probably saw a gift- fill the dreary seat, and get bipartisan credit to boot. What happened next was likely a combination, of pressure from Gregg’s party not to play ball and someone in the Obama Administration making it clear to Gregg that he would forever be a second class citizen. After a lifetime as a droopy B Leaguer living under the buttcheeks of Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell, it’s hard to imagine that would be too hard for Gregg to accept. More likely is that he was “got to” by a party that is shivering with insecurity and has decided to counter the president’s civility and charm with hardnosed opposition on every front. The offer of a nice, fat lobbying gig was probably all it took to shake Gregg loose, and best of all, to deal Obama yet one more cabinet embarrassment. It looks like Obama is going to learn the hard way that there is indeed a Red State America and a Blue State America, and that the Red Staters are up to do everything they can to, as Rush Limbaugh said, see that he “fails.”

Regardless of the outcome of the still-to-close-to-call election in Israel, it’s almost a certainty that the next government will be a coalition between Likud chair Binyamin Netanyahu and third place finisher, lunatic fringe Israel Beiteinu chair Avigdor Lieberman. If you have not followed Israeli politics, that’s essentially as if our own government was handed over to the folks who- literally- want an endless line of buses to take anyone with a Spanish language accent over the Mexican border and dump them there. It is a marriage that can only be consummated in a proportionally representative democracy in which the tail can wag the dog, and it is a mean and ugly, nakedly bigoted, dog indeed that will wag Israel for the next few years. While any realistic hope of a “two state solution” was strangled by West Bank settlements years ago, a Netanyahu/Lieberman government will put the kabosh on the polite discourse over glasses of wine in the salons of Manhattan, San Francisco, Miami and L.A. around that idea for good. It will become an “Us verses Them” struggle from here on out and only the most ignorant or deluded will be able to imagine otherwise.

What it effectively means, with Lieberman foaming at the mouth in a high profile cabinet position, is that the last fig leaf around any notion of cohabitation with the Palestinians will be yanked away. It means that the Rightest of the Right Wing will be empowered to pursue their ultimate goal- one state of Israel populated exclusively by Jews. The form this will take, of course, will be endless footdragging on peace discussions while new West Bank settlements are built and an endless shoulder shrugging about Hamas rockets that will require additional incursions into Gaza. While it could be argued that true Israeli policy has ever been thus, with no major moderating voices to at least pay lip service to any kind of peace agreement, the game will be on for all to see. This, needless to say, will put yet yet another challenge before the world and especially President Obama. The Islamic World will not sit idly by and the race to be the leading voices of Jihad will officially be on. European governments, likewise, will challenged by what will look on their streets to be like South Africa at best, and Bosnia at worst. They have their own Islamic populations to consider, which present them will challenges enough without this. But it is Obama that will face the toughest decision. There will be tremendous pressure on him to support the Israelis in the media, from the most powerful lobbying groups in America, and from the vast expanse of “End of Days” Christians who number roughly fifteen to twenty percent of the country. To do so, however, or even to sit idly by, will cement the divide between the United States and the Arab and Islamic World for generations. Israel is the glue that holds otherwise diverse and historically unstable alliances bonded together. Retaliation against Zionism gives millions of people who live without hope in grinding poverty a glorious cause to which to dedicate their lives and to aspire to a level of heroism that, in lands devoid of education or commerce, is not available any other way. Obama, and all of us, are going to have to decide if an Israel that already practices naked apartheid which it justifies by rubbing our collective noses endlessly in the tragedies of the concentration camps of World War II, is dear enough to us that we really want to take on the rest of the world for them. The grim reality is that there is nowhere to go but down from here.

If he hadn’t learned the lesson yet, President Obama found out in a big way that nice guys really do finish last in Washington. To be more precise, it’s not just nice guys who bring up the rear, but anyone who tries to be “bipartisan” or to “reach across the isle” or other such noble ideas. Those who try this are actually unclear on how the process works. When you think about it, what Obama was trying to do was to actually merge the two parties together into a working coalition to address the current state of national crisis. To do so would be to effectively absorb enough centrists and moderates to create “an Obama Party,” at the expense of the two traditional parties. No matter how charming he was, and however many dinners at George Will’s house he went to, that was simply never going to happen. And, to his credit, Obama is a fast learner and the last two days have seen him abandon those efforts and start swinging back.

A realistic view of the two houses of congress show the following. In the House, those Republicans who remain come from gerrymandered districts that represent the reddest of the red state Americans- the “where’s your flag pin” crowd. The only thing these members have to fear are attacks from their rightmost flanks and signing on to anything Obama and the Dems put on the table is political strychnine. So, as Rahm Emanuel should have known well, the House was a write-off from Day One. But perhaps the bigger problem for Obama is his own party. Winning can do terrible things to a political party, especially one that’s been out of power. They tend to misread their victory as a vote of confidence in their ideas and programs when in reality much of the vote was just tossing the other guys out. What happens is instead of taking a fresh look at the challenges before them, they just drag out their old dogmas and hacks. This, clearly, is the problem Nancy Pelosi has as evidenced by the totally artless way the House Stimulus Bill was put together. Condoms? Really? Money for Hollywood movie producers? Seriously? Could you be any more clueless? Why not add the freedom to burn the flag while you’re at it?

If Obama was really naive enough to think that “reaching across the isle” would engender good will and that Republicans would feel respected and valued enough to jump on his bandwagon, the big black eye he got this week will hopefully teach him a lesson. This ain’t gonna be nice or fun, it’s going to be hard and brutal. That’s just how the game is played. He is going to get his agenda not by recruiting centrists but by putting the heat on Republican senators from purple states like Pennsylvania, Maine and Iowa who don’t want to see him at rallies for their opposition candidates in two years- or even worse seeing his money machine working against them. Write off the House altogether, but just keep Pelosi in line and hold obviously controversial stuff- abortion, gay marriage, etc- at bay at least until things are stabilized. Stick with the pragmatic, sound and forward looking vision that got you to the White House in the first place.

But most important of all, know, every day and at every step of the way, that Republicans in both chambers will be gunning for you 24/7 and doing everything they can do derail your presidency. That is just how the game is played. Get used to it.