spin.thumbnail.JPGThe AP’s Liz Sidoti does her best to declare Obama’s presidency over before it’s even officially started. She ladles on the gloom-and-doom with a cement mixer:

No new president has faced so much since Franklin Delano Roosevelt — and even he didn’t have two wars on his plate.

Roosevelt had four months to come up with programs to address the Great Depression before he took office on March 4, 1933.

Obama gets just 2 1/2 to put together his government; inauguration is Jan. 20.

Ahem. First off, the GSA has transition-team offices, complete with BlackBerries, ready to go right now. Furthermore, Obama’s transition team has been up and running for months already — so much so that John McCain’s campaign actually attacked him for it (h/t Mark Nickolas):

“Before they’ve even crossed the 50-yard line, the Obama campaign is already dancing in the end zone with a new White House transition team,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said in a statement. “The American people are more concerned with Barack Obama’s poor judgment and readiness to lead than his inaugural ball.”

Of course, as Nickolas points out, both Bush and Gore had their transition teams up and running by that point in the 2000 election cycle.

But I digress. Let’s go from McCain campaign idiocy back to Sidoti idiocy:

He will chart the country’s course against this dreary backdrop: Unemployment is at 6.1 percent and predicted to rise as high as 7.5 percent next year; pessimistic consumers have curtailed borrowing and spending; home foreclosures are rampant; Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security face huge financial problems; and, 152,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq more than five years after the initial invasion, while 32,000 are in Afghanistan in the sixth year of the war against terrorism.

Let us unpack this, as Josh Marshall is wont to say.

The troop involvement is a big drain on our resources, as well as providing an irritant in the Middle East that serves as the best recruiting sergeant that Al-Qaeda and other anti-Western groups could desire. Pulling out of Iraq, in addition to being what the Iraqis want (both the people in general and key leaders such as prime minister Nouri al-Maliki) want, would ease both our financial drain and the diplomatic strains in that part of the world. An argument has been made — the famous "Pottery Barn argument" — that a) we have a responsibility to stay and fix what we broke, and b) leaving would cause Iraq to devolve into an even worse state. Yet the same people who are most strenuously making that argument are also the ones who say that "the surge worked", discounting the role of Moqtada al-Sadr’s longstanding truce in reducing violence in Iraq.

While Medicare and Medicaid are indeed in trouble, Social Security is not. Period. (And Medicare and Medicaid’s problems would have been greatly alleviated by the $700 billion Hank Paulson was given. But that’s another story.) So long as the long-term growth rate of the US economy averages at or above 2.7% (which is actually the level of growth one sees in a mild-to-moderate recession), Social Security never runs out of money. This growth average is not especially difficult to achieve: In the seventy-five-year period from 1929 to 2004, the economy grew at an average rate of 3.6% — and this period includes the Great Depression.

The myth of Social Security’s imminent demise has been nurtured for decades by the Cato Institute and other entities that want to see one of America’s best social programs "privatized" – that is, ripped to shreds and its lucrative hunks handed off to private investment firms that will start charging massive amounts of overhead, as happened to the pension plans of the UK and Chile when they were privatized. Higher overhead costs means less pension money paid to the pensioners. (Ironically, in order to sell this butchery, the privatizers promise long-term rates of return that are possible only if the economy grows at 1998-level Clinton-boom rates — and if the economy grows at those rates, Social Security not only is solvent, it has money coming out of its metaphorical ears.)

But wait! Sidoti’s not done spewing bull:

With Democrats expanding their majorities in both the House and Senate, Obama will have to figure out how to lead a country that’s more conservative than liberal while trying to satisfy the left wing of his party.

Ah, yes, the old "Obama and the Democrats are too liberal to lead America so they better not try to exercise their mandate" line. Too bad it’s utter bollocks. Hell, even Republicans will admit as much, in unguarded moments.  As Bob Geiger notes, Obama’s record matches up with what Americans have said they want, in poll after poll.

But that won’t stop Sidoti from working to wish away his mandate:

Indeed, coming in with a big victory doesn’t guarantee success.

Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson won with 61 percent of the vote in 1964. He won his Great Society programs in his first two years but his administration essentially collapsed in the final two with the escalation of the Vietnam War.

That’s a somewhat incomplete, not to mention misleading, reading of the record.

For one thing, Obama’s stated intent is to get troops out of Iraq by 2010. He could increase the forces currently in Afghanistan, but not to the level of current troop strength in Iraq. He couldn’t increase the overall amount of troop deployments even if he wanted to, as current troop levels simply can’t be sustained — we’re so short on warm bodies due to the long wars in both places that troops trained in one specialty are sent to do things for which they have little or no training.

For another, Vietnam was only one of the factors that damaged LBJ. The one that he himself thought to have been the most politically damaging was, in fact, his championing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Prominent conservative Dixiecrat Richard Russell warned him that backing the Civil Rights Act "will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election." As Johnson said to his young aide Bill Moyers upon signing it, "We have lost the South for a generation." Indeed, to this day the South is the GOP’s strongest region. That, however, didn’t stop Barack Obama from winning the presidency this year. At long last, playing on old racial fears by way of what Republican strategist Kevin Philips termed "the Southern Strategy" is no longer a guarantee of Republican success at the ballot box.

To sum it up: Ms. Sidoti, I beg to differ.