In my opinion, the use of the term abomination in political discourse should be an abomination.
The absolute terribleness of the deal worked out by our president depends on how our political system tilts in the coming year. As a political-economist, I'd like to proffer the strategy of accepting the pragmatic judgments of our de facto leader and hewing to the party-line in nat'l politics, so we don't set up more circular firing squads, while pushing hard for some form of Strategic Election Reform in state politics as the way to subvert the snafu our democracy is still stuck in.
dlw
See below for a synopsis of Strategic Election Reform and why president Obama would have a hard time saying no to it...
Strategic Election Reform is a position in the electoral reform debate. Electoral reform is a debate about what sort of election rules we ought to use. Strategic Election Reform(SER) holds that there are two fundamental types of elections: winner-take-all (single-seated) and winner-doesn't-take-all (multi-seated) and that we need both to sustain a healthy democracy. An implication of SER is that it is because we only use winner-take-all elections in the US that our democracy has been so unhealthy in recent years. It makes our politics tend to tilt to effective single-party rule at the state and national levels. If we used winner-doesn't-take-all 3-seated elections* for state representative elections then more elections would become competitive and neither major party could dominate our politics. If neither major party could get a "permanent majority", it would make their rivalry no longer "cut-throat" and help to transform them both into better parties. The cumulative effects of the transformations caused by Strategic Election Reform would be to make our democracy more inclusive and dynamic.
This goal is what Obama described in the first chapter of his book, The Audacity of Hope. Unforunately, getting the right person into power has not acheived it, but it would be acheivable if we simply improved upon the electoral reform that used to exist in Illinois from 1870-1980. In Illinois, they had a 3-seated cumulative voting election for state representatives for more than a century. It made their political system more dynamic and inclusive. It wasn't perfect, but apparently Senator Obama thought cumulative voting should make a comeback. Maybe, instead of getting on President Obama's case over this deal, we should demand that he appease us by using his bully pulpit to push for the use of 3-seated Hare-LR in state representative elections.
It's a matter of political pragmatism/jujitsu/schadenfreude. Pragmatism: We must provisionally accept difficult judgments made by our leaders even when we don't like it or them. Jujitsu: We must act strategically wrt our more powerful opponents. Schandenfreude: We must focus on upsetting the Republican slash tea-party alliance and making the Democratic party establishment need its party activists more to do well in the state representative elections.
dlw