In painful contrast

Alas that the U.S. prior to Aug. 1 could not have seen such a headline as this from today's Times, with some noun substitutions:

Merkel Called Bankers’ Bluff to Win Europe a Debt Plan

Or a narrative about our president like this:

But Mrs. Merkel called the bankers’ bluff, said officials present at the discussions. Accept the 50 percent write-down, she told the bankers, or bear the consequences of default. In effect, she was willing to risk a credit event, and to place the blame for any fallout on them. 

The key words here are no, risk, and blame. Conspicuously absent from Obama's negotiating vocabulary and repertoire.

Yes, the European debt deal is inadequate and leaves core questions unresolved -- how the banks will recapitalize, how the bailout fund will be funded, how countries crippled by imposed austerity can grow and thus repay their debt. But given the imperative to get this minimum threshold demand across, Merkel didn't blink.

Some comparisons are obvious...

of course, of course. But still, this echo gave me a bit of a chill.  One passage in my rebuttal of Drew Westen's attack on Obama bounced around the web quite a bit, e.g., in the LA Times online:

Sprung, blogging at Xpostfactoid, compared Obama's challengers on the left to Martin Luther King Jr.'s critics during the civil rights era. "Let's not forget that many African Americans at times regarded King as an appeasing sellout, much as many progressives now see Obama as one," Sprung wrote. "The Panthers and the Nation of Islam were more satisfying to many. King called out his adversaries, but he never shrank from engaging with them. Neither has Obama — though the results have not always been what his base could have wished."

Obama, of course, quotes King all the time, and is not shy about identifying with him or Lincoln (and damn the obvious "Mr Obama, you're no..." rejoinders).  As in Iowa yesterday:

"I think that we forget when [Martin Luther King Jr.] was alive there was nobody who was more vilified, nobody who was more controversial, nobody who was more despairing at times. There was a decade that followed the great successes of Birmingham and Selma in which he was just struggling, fighting the good fight, and scorned, and many folks angry.  But what he understood, what kept him going, was that the arc of moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.  But it doesn’t bend on its own.  It bends because all of us are putting our hand on the arc and we are bending it in that direction.  And it takes time.  And it's hard work.  And there are frustrations."