Does our President run the country?

People give too much credit to Obama. He does not have that much leeway. After all, he is a creature of our peculiar system:

We've moved from Bad Cop Bush to Good Cop Obama." Same old story, just another day.

By and large, Obama is simply reading the "President's Play Book." To wit: Wall Street runs the government (therefore Larry Summers is your man and not Dean Baker or Paul Krugman) and the Pentagon runs any foreign policy that Wall Street is not running (that's why we have Gates and not Kucinich).

(Remember the Eisenhower quip about the "Industrial-military complex" that was running out country? It's true--it's now called the "military-wall street complex."

Always was that way--our founding fathers, like the super-wealthy George Washington or the mildly wealthy James Madison, wanted the rich to rule--they preferred monarchy, of course, but settled for oligarchy.