Yet another answer to Jonathan Alter's Challenge

Mickey Kaus offers yet another good response to Obama apologist Jonathan Alter's bizarre challenge to say what should have been done differently. I have now seen dozens of reponses to Alter. Can we stipulate Alter's challenge has been met and exceeded? How myopic must you be not to learn from your mistakes? What compels Alter to keep defending the indefensible?

1. Not subcontracted out the details of the 2009 stimulus to interest-group-addled Congressional Democrats. 

2. Sold his health care reform as a valuable benefit for voters that would give them security (they’d be covered) and freedom (they could leave their jobs without losing insurance) rather than as an eat-your-peas plan that would not only “bend the cost curve” 

3. Made the UAW take a pay cut. 

4. Pivoted to jobs

5. Not pursued a zombie agenda of “card check” and “comprehensive immigration reform”

6. Dispelled legitimate fears of “corporatism“

7.  going vigorously after Wall Street.

8. Not appointed pro-union innovators to NLRB who try to hamstring our biggest remaining industrial exporter 

9. Faced with Republican demands for leaner government, embraced them! 

10. Defend the core of Medicare, a popular universal program that works and (according to Orszag) is cutting costs, rather than proposing to  shrink Medicare by raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67.