The Democratic Congress and the Obama Administration have wasted political capital this past year in a manner that makes Wall Street losses look like child’s play.

Democrats—infamous for circling up, loading up, and firing at one other—are on the verge of perfecting the art of self-destruction. Senate Dems are particularly adept at imploding, unable to impose Party discipline in a circle where every Senator’s vote is crucial. The sordid deal cut with Ben Nelson for his support of the health care bill (his vote for millions of additional Medicaid funds for Nebraska) is but one example. This week the revelation of repugnant remarks by Harry Reid about (“Negro”) candidate Obama underscored his own incapacity to provide political and moral leadership to a Party thought to be in control, but which is actually in disarray.

Democrats don’t seem to know how to wield the power they have. The famous photos of LBJ towering over Senators, giving them “The Johnson Treatment” of political persuasion, are distant memories in an Administration and Congress unable to coalesce and use power to effect promised change (anyone seen the President’s “take no prisoners” Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel of late?). Party leaders, moreover, are totally out of touch with the growing restlessness and simmering anger of the electorate, in spite of their shellacking last August during the town hall debacles on health care. Slow progress on the economic front can no longer be explained away or laid at the feet of the previous Administration. Job losses and unemployment mount. Bankers walk off with massive bonuses. “Health care reform” is now “health insurance reform.” The expansion of war—not the contraction promised—hangs over the nation. Dramatic slides in public approval rating ought to signal the dire need and deep desire for real change we can believe in.

But the other side of the proverbial political coin—those who helped elect this President and this Congress—is just as responsible for the mess we’re in. Sedate and silent for too long by the notion that “we won” and all will be well, the grassroots “movement” that put Barack Obama in the White House has dissipated. Anger—a primary motivator of change—emanates from those on the hard right who capitalize on fear. Liberals, progressives, Republicans, and Independents who flocked to Obama the candidate now take a hands-off approach to Obama the President, and to the Democrats in Congress who supposedly are advancing their agenda for change. “Can’t criticize our friends,” goes the prevailing mantra. The consequences of such indifference will be politically disastrous down the road (as early as this November), and will further compound the nation’s spider-web of social and economic problems.

The failure of this Congress and this Administration to deliver on the “Change We Can Believe In” will have lasting and dramatic social, economic, and political consequences for years, indeed generations. The time has come to call these Democrats to accountability, to reality. The brilliant campaign run by Barack Obama and his team inspired hope and new possibility for change across the nation and the world. If you believed in that possibility, you had better get up, get fired up, and get engaged and organized once again, or lament this lost opportunity forever. And Democrats, take note: you had better wake up, stop wasting this unique opportunity, use the power you have effectively, or get out of the way.