While President Obama has spent weeks crisscrossing the country publicly promoting his American Jobs Act, ironically in Washington his administration has been focused on lobbying Congress to approve a package of job-killing free trade deals. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the NAFTA-style South Korea Free Trade deal could cost America roughly 159,000 jobs while Colombia would export another 54,000.

I believe that what the folks on the front line in Wisconsin needed most was a united national movement amplifying their grievances and demands. They needed a strong national voice framing a very different, more supportive message than the one they’ve been getting from their President and national Democratic leaders. What they got instead can only have hurt Wisconsin’s efforts.

The consistent message from the national Democratic party and President Obama is that “this is the era of austerity.”

CNN’s State of the Union featured California’s Democratic Governor, Jerry Brown, the man who was my governor when I entered state service in 1976. He’s no longer Governor Moonbeam. He’s now a mainstream Democratic leader, which is much worse.

His comments on Washington politics and the stark choices Californians and all Americans face were typical of the defeated, resigned, and morally bankrupt posture of the Democratic Party. I don’t know why these people bothered to run for office.

By now, many of you have probably read Frank Rich’s inaugural piece for New York Magazine. Freed from the bean counters and word counters of the New York Times, Rich pours forth pages (and pages) on what he calls “Obama’s Original Sin.”

I am not going to say that Rich is not being tough, per se, just that he isn’t as tough as he thinks.

The unofficial theme of this conference was of a movement at a crossroads, with a choice between our most deeply cherished principles and our understandable concern in accidentally empowering an insane and openly fascist Republican Party over a corrupt, ideologically conservative, and fully propagandized Democratic Party.

I think if the President had spent the last three years repeating some variation of this, he’d be in much better shape — as would the Democratic Party.

I remember receiving a phone call from a prominent newspaper reporter in Fall 2009 about the emergence of the Tea Party, largely in opposition to President Barack Obama’s health care legislation. “Is the Tea Party going to become a major force in American politics,” the reporter asked. “No,” I responded confidently. “Like other fringe protest parties in the past, it will fizzle quickly. Their message is too negative.”

I have never been so wrong in my life!

As President Obama launches his 2012 campaign, his poll numbers with Democratic voters aren’t that great. The latest YouGov/Economist poll has him at 74 approve/20 disapprove among Democrats, which is in the ballpark of a DailyKos poll from last week. And if you look at Pollster’s current poll of polls, 79.1% of Democrats approve and 15.2% disapprove.

In The Monster, Michael Hudson gives us a detailed account of the how Roland Arnall created Ameriquest and made it into the giant of subprime lending. In the process the book implicates the major Wall Street firms, most importantly Lehman, who eagerly packaged junk loans into mortgage backed securities and more complicated instruments. He also notes the corruption of the three major credit rating agencies, who received big fees for giving these assets investment grade stamps. The list of aiders and abettors includes Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, California Governors Grey Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even the community group ACORN.

Have the policies of President Obama been good for the Democratic Party? The answer, in the short term at least, is a resounding no.