Now Issa has announced that he expects the Oversight committee and its subcommittees to hold nearly three times as many investigative hearings over the next two years as Henry Waxman, an active and successful chairman, ran during the final years of the Bush administration. He may consider the federal government (and the White House) to be bottomless pits of waste, fraud and abuse, but are there really three times as many troubling issues for Issa and his colleagues to study now as there were in the Bush years?

The answer is yes, so long as the threshold for investigation is absurdly low, such as the question of whether federal agencies are spending too much money on signs to identify construction projects funded by stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Road signs displaying the names of various government officials and agencies are neither new nor scandalous, but local Republicans have been whining about the erection of signs bearing the president’s name and the Recovery Act logo as examples of Soviet-style propaganda. For months, Issa has been riding this issue, promoting stories in local newspapers that suggest waste, wrongdoing and political misuse of funds, with hints that the Recovery Act symbol bears a suspicious resemblance to the 2008 Obama campaign logo. Last August, World Net Daily, which did so much to promote phony scandals a decade ago, urged its gullible readers to "report" the ARRA signs to Issa's office (under the byline of the foul-mouthed Swift boat hoaxter Jerome Corsi).

This week, Issa indicated that he will continue to pursue such small-time, seemingly bogus concerns with a tweet linking to an article complaining about stimulus project signage in the Greeley Gazette: "Citizen-watchdogs & new technology made this (http://tinyurl.com/28egdr5) possible ... how can we do more of this? Would love your thoughts."

It is hard to imagine that road signs represent more than a minuscule fraction of 1 percent of the $787 billion stimulus budget, but then again Republicans constantly bemoan minor spending items -- such as congressional earmarks -- that actually have almost no real fiscal impact. Perhaps their budgetary record is historically so miserable because they just can't do the arithmetic. But that can scarcely be true of Issa, an entrepreneur who earned his own huge fortune and is still the wealthiest member of Congress.

Certainly Issa should provide serious oversight of the stimulus spending, which is a fundamental congressional responsibility assigned to his committee. He ought to stop taking potshots at road signs -- and instead start examining the administration's record in selecting and contracting projects.

Of course, that might not be quite as much fun as stirring up the Tea Party rubes with diversions like the road sign "issue." According to the independent watchdogs at Pro Publica and Politifact, the administration has succeeded in contracting stimulus projects at considerably lower cost than originally anticipated so far. Lower bidding has meant millions of dollars saved, with those saved funds in turn financing thousands of additional projects -- and many thousands of jobs -- across the country.

Rouse is Pete Rouse, the probable interim chief of staff. He is, apparently, not as much of a moron as Rahm Emanuel, who is under the impression that rich white coastal Democrats are the only segment of the base worth appeasing -- because they're the only people in this great big country that care what the Times says.

"Governing principally through the Times" is a brilliantly succinct way to describe precisely what has gone wrong with Obama's first term so far, from start to finish. (It also more or less works as a diagnosis for what ails the entire post-1994 Democratic Party.) I imagine that means governing through Matt Bai and Sheryl Gay Stolberg more than it means, say, Paul Krugman.

Meanwhile, Ari Berman's new book tells the tale of how the White House neglected the Obama campaign's massive army of excited young progressives once it switched to "governing via the Times" mode.

It would perhaps help, now, if the White House took responsibility for the "enthusiasm gap" itself, instead of blaming liberals for it.

(It might also help if they went back in time a year, fired Bernanke, made some Fed appointments, and proposed some sort of massive infrastructure and jobs program, back when those things could've helped the jobs situation enough to make the forthcoming Democratic blood bath less inevitable. But some of those actions would've upset your typical Times reader, who loves Republican Fed chairmen and is scared of the deficit.)

In foreign policy, despite grumbling by progressives, Obama’s caution has served the country well, following the reckless militarism of the Bush years. But in domestic policy Obama’s New Democrat version of Rockefeller Republicanism is utterly unsuited to the challenges of our time. The central idea of the post-1980 Reagan settlement, shared with the "reinventing government" ideology of Clinton and Gore, has been corporatism -- the outsourcing of public functions, including war, to for-profit corporations. With the exception of his student loan initiative, Obama has pursued a corporatist agenda that includes achieving universal healthcare by forcing more Americans to buy defective products from predatory insurance companies, and trying to address global warming by creating a rigged market for carbon that would enrich speculators while raising energy prices for American citizens and productive businesses.

The tragedy of Obama is that his kind of cautious minimalism would be a virtue in an era of peace and prosperity, but is a vice in an age of national and global crisis. Our times call for determined and, if necessary, crude leaders willing to knock down rotten structures that can no longer be patched up. It remains to be seen whether Obama’s tragedy is America’s as well. 

Michael Lind is the editor of New American Contract at the New America Foundation.

Simply by virtue of being a Democrat, he has energized the right, which has allowed a fringe movement punctuated by paranoid, racist extremists to speak for it and often for the entire Republican Party. And yet, rather than use this to fire up his own base, Obama only alienated some of his core constituencies, pushing them away as he pursued people who in turn pushed him way.

Obama's coldness toward gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people upon taking office could have predicted that he wouldn't get tough on the banks or show any passion for a public option. Gays were the canaries in the coal mine back on Day One of this administration. That was the day when Rick Warren gave the invocation at the inauguration. It signaled how easily this president would insult and sideline a loyal constituency in return for the false promise of bringing in people who will never support him.

Since then he has stepped on his LGBT supporters time and again, including that heinous Defense of Marriage Act brief filed by the Justice Department last June. In addition to pointing to a flowery speech here or there, apologists will tell you about the hate crimes bill or other "pro-gay" actions. But they are no-brainers; Obama has yet to spend any capital on gays.

This has had LGBT leaders scrambling, often told they must wait until healthcare reform is done. But even if the bill passes, Obama may have so demoralized his base in trying to get just about anything through that gay rights and other social issues may be pushed off indefinitely if Democrats lose big in November. And that may adversely affect the rest of Obama's presidency in addition to lots of people's lives. 

Michelangelo Signorile is an author, journalist and radio host. "The Michelangelo Signorile Show" airs weekdays from 2 p.m.-6 p.m. on Sirius XM's OutQ.