Yes We Can is Needed NOW

Friedman speaks it right in the NYT today. Yes, we need the climate bill passed in all it's imperfect glory. But what concerns me more is where is the eerily quiet Obama on all this. As Friedman point out:

I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very
calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to
get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much
that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this
war.

It's like he's already positioning for 2012 and thought it'd good to have him back again (probably) his next term will be worse than this one if he doesn't get the ball moving now.

And just to further my point that the Legislative Branch is worthless, Yglesias' point on the issue:

The Senators in question aren’t going to care that coal state House members already did this. They need to do it personally so they can claim credit. So you need to go back to a cleaner bill, then basically let the coal state Democrats
do what Rick Boucher (D-WV) already did all over again. That way they can say that they changed the bill, and saved Appalachia from the depredations of the environmentalists, which sounds a lot better than just giving Boucher the credit.

And, yes, that’s stupid. But I’m quite confident that’s how congress works.