if by being uncourageous you mean he has not gone full left, he just cannot get anything done that way. The President cannot just unilaterally pass laws. He pushed Health Care and despite the bad publicity it has done a heck of a lot for ordinary people. It is a start.
Single Payer will eventually happen. Change takes time...and will depend on demographics as I mentioned.
Well, take health care then. If you want a public option, surely the obvious strategy is to push for single payer and compromise at a public option. But no, he gives up single payer, not to mention price controls, months before negotiations start, then pushes a public option and compromises at a half-arsed mandate that will insure a lot more people but is basically a massive giveaway to the insurance industry (who understandably love it). Then the Republicans crucify him for it anyway, even though it's essentially quite conservative and based on Romney's plan.
Or take the stimulus. A massive stimulus would have saved millions of working-class people from unemployment and got the economy going. But he goes for a mild one, because he's scared of Republicans and ratings agencies and right-wing economists scaremongering about inflation and borrowing costs. A couple of years on, inflation's low and investors are
paying the US to borrow from them, and yet they get downgraded anyway and the Republicans, of course, slaughter him for profligacy anyway.
And all that was with a majority in both Houses.
If - and it's a big if, especially if the Euro tanks the world economy again - he gets a second term, hopefully he'll have learnt that all moving to the right to accomodate the Republicans achieves is centre-right policies.
Or maybe those are the policies he wants.
