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In the words of perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest philosopher, David Byrne: “same as it ever was.”

Finally, if the point isn’t clear enough, consider one last example: climate change regulation.

The 2008 campaign happened against the background of a profound awakening of awareness about the dangers from climate change. Al Gore was behind much of this new awareness—not because any single soul slogging across the world giving thousands of Keynote (not PowerPoint) talks about a problem is enough to solve it, but when the power of those talks got amplified by the talent of a filmmaker such as Davis Guggenheim, that became a recipe for a real change in awareness. The film won an Oscar. Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize. Both political parties, and both candidates, insisted that they were the candidate, and theirs was the party, to fight global warming. Senator McCain had long maintained, contrary to many Republicans, that he believed global warming was real, and something the government had to address. Senator Obama could say the same, and made climate change legislation a central plank of his campaign.

So when Obama won by a landslide, and with a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate, environmental activists were ecstatic: here, finally, was a chance to get something done about arguably the most important public policy problem facing the globe.

In the first two years of the Obama administration, environmental groups did whatever they could to support the administration’s efforts to get a bill. After they contributed close to $5.6 million in the 2008 elections, and spent $22.4 million lobbying Congress in 2009 (compared with $35.6 million spent by opponents of reform in the 2008 election, and $175 million spent lobbying Congress in 2009),52 the House produced an extremely compromised “cap-and-trade” bill.53

Even that bill, however, couldn’t survive the onslaught of special-interest money. On July 22, 2010, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the cap-and-trade bill was dead. And thus, no global warming legislation will now be passed during at least the first term of Obama’s administration.

In each case, the story is the same. The interests that would be affected by the CHANGE that Obama promised lobbied and contributed enough to block real change. Not completely, but substantially. Seven billion dollars have been spent lobbying this Congress during the first two years of the Obama administration, almost $1 billion more than was spent in the last two years of the Bush administration.54 That money blocks reform. It will always block reform, at least so long as the essential element to effecting reform, Congress, remains pathologically dependent upon the campaign cash that those who block reform can deliver. As Al Gore has described it, “The influence of special interests is now at an extremely unhealthy level…. It’s virtually impossible for participants in the current political system to enact any significant change without first seeking and gaining permission from the largest commercial interests who are most affected by the proposed change.”55

Robert Reich makes the same point: “As a practical matter, this means that in order to enact any piece of legislation that may impose costs on the private sector, Congress and the administration must pay off enough industries and subsets of industries… to gain their support and therefore a fair shot at winning a majority.”56

The president gets this. He waged a campaign committed to changing it. He promised us that changing it was “why [he was] running.” He challenged us to “take up the fight”57 with him.

Then the president surrounded himself with an army of tiny minds whose vision of governance was Clinton’s, not Obama’s. And in the tyranny of those tiny minds, the reform that Obama promised died.

When critics like me attacked this retreat, the administration defended itself by claiming the president was never a “leftist.” But the problem with this