Barack “I suck up to Wall Street Like 1000 Hoover vacuum cleaners” Obama is not folding on tax cuts for the hyper-rich, he wanted them to keep their tax cuts all along:

It’s been clear for some time that President Obama made the political calculation that he does not want any of the Bush tax cuts to expire. He doesn’t want to be the guy in 2012 running for President on having “raised taxes during a time of recession.”

But the President also doesn’t want the political blowback of angering people who cheered him on the campaign trail when he promised to let the tax cuts expire. And so rather than just come out and just say that, he’s been actively trying to kill a Chuck Schumer deal to keep them from expiring on income of more than $1 million a year. It was a plan that put the GOP in an awkward position, and had thrown them off message in recent days — hard to be the people fighting for the 315,000 families who fall into that category over the 2 million set to lose their unemployment benefits by the end of the year.

The President argued against the Schumer deal, we are told, because he was concerned about “the cost [to the deficit] and the risk of redefining the middle class as those making over [should read under] one million.”

The President’s argument is, of course, pure crap.

I think that when we look at Barack Obama’s performance on issues of real reform, it’s clear that he falls short of his rhetoric because he does not want real reform.

Financial reform was mostly smoke and mirrors, with small steps, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, being driven by a need to avoid totally alienating his base in 2012.

The same goes for taxes, or for the give-away to health insurers that is laughably called healthcare reform.

Go read the rest.