So there I was Tuesday evening as I am many Tuesday evenings, at Drinking Liberally. People in whose opinion and progressive zeal I had long trusted were whining and moping. One or two of them even declared the Obama era to have died, and any hope for this troubled land along with it.

“He could have been another FDR,” one sighed. But now, this critic inveighed, Obama was bound to go down in history “worse than Carter.”

All on the basis of one particular, poorly timed and poorly justified, cave to Republican intransigence on bonuses for billionaires, as part of a big give n’ take in which the GOPpers actually did a little bit of givin’.

Look: This guy’s been counted out before. He’ll come back.

And as for progressivism in general, it’s just getting started.

There is, and will continue to be, a lot of work to be done, on both the macro and the micro levels, on getting this country’s course corrected.

It would help if we had a federal government that was with us on this.

But it needs doing anyway, with or without their participation.