Liberals Analyze Their Obama ‘Despair’
by Abby Phillip
For many liberals, it is the summer of their discontent.
![[Many liberals are disappointed with President Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on his campaign promises. ]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/obama_libs_ap_289.jpg "obama_libs_ap_289.jpg")
Many liberals are disappointed with President Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on his campaign promises.Already disappointed with President Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on campaign promises, they now contemplate a slowing economic recovery and a good chance of Republican gains in November. Such developments would make enacting Obama’s agenda even more difficult.
Two recent essays framed the debate raging within the progressive community over why the promise of Obama’s candidacy has not lived up to their expectations - and how liberals should proceed in what they fear will be difficult months ahead.
In a 17,000-plus word piece published in The Nation on Thursday, journalist Eric Alterman calls the Obama presidency “a big disappointment” for progressives and blamed a broken system in Washington that he says allows the minority party to rule with impunity, and special interests and big money to dictate legislative policy.
“Face it,” he concludes, “the system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us.” His essay is subtitled: “Why a progressive presidency is impossible for now.”
But writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Michael Tomasky, the editor, counsels patience, arguing that American history has shown that change always takes time and continued effort against entrenched conservative opposition.
“The changes we want to see won’t happen in 18 months, or in two years, or four, or probably even eight,” he concludes in his article, ”Against Despair.”
The essays suggest it is a time of reckoning for a liberal community whose relationship with Obama has had a series of ups and downs since the climactic moment of hope and expectation when he claimed the presidency in Chicago’s Grant Park on Nov. 4th, 2008.
“It’s not just really about Obama, it’s about the state of our country. Every day, you have a sense that people are wondering where this country is headed,” says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.
The elation of that night in 2008 quickly gave way to the realization that the Number One issue, the economy, and the ensuing fight over an $800 billion stimulus bill, would make Obama’s agenda different from the one he had described in his campaign.
From the beginning, the stimulus bill was viewed as containing too many compromises in a futile attempt to garner Republican support. Economist and columnist Paul Krugman led the charge, arguing that the bill was not ambitious enough, containing too many tax cuts and not enough funding for infrastructure projects.
But the bill’s $800 billion price tag created a toxic environment for congressional Democrats when they began the long debate over health care, and many liberals viewed Obama’s compromises on the legislation as a betrayal. The low point may have been after the special election victory of Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) in January, when the possibility of any health care legislation seemed lost.
“It’s open season on Obama, whom so many hoped would lead us out of the neo-liberal wilderness,” Firedoglake blogger Les Leopold declared not long afterward. “He once was a community organizer and ought to know how working people have suffered through a generation of tax breaks for the rich, Wall Street deregulation and unfair competition. When the economy crashed, he was in the perfect position to limit the unjustified pay levels on Wall Street. …”
“Instead, we got a multitrillion dollar bailout for Wall Street, no health care reform, no serious financial reforms whatsoever, record unemployment and political gridlock that will be with us for years to come.”
The bill’s passage was viewed as a major victory for the White House, but the reaction among progressives was mixed, at best. Only 10 days after the House bill passed, Tomasky writes, “things on the liberal side were more or less back to the dour normal.”
“It simply took too long to pass health care,” The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. said. ”What should have been seen as an important progressive victory didn’t feel like it was as much of a victory because it just took so damn long.”
But the worst seems yet to come.
“The bad economy creates a mood in which everything looks a bit more bleak than it did before,” Dionne said. “The economy helps to create the less-than-wonderful poll numbers for Democrats, and it conditions the national mood – and all of that affects the way that progressives feel.”
The list of grievances includes a slew of agenda items yet to be meaningfully addressed: a climate change bill, immigration reform, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and the Employer Free Choice Act, not to mention a war in Afghanistan that many liberals oppose.
Yet, some of the blame that once was put squarely on Obama and his White House staff has now shifted to a broken system where congressional Republicans have exerted power that does not rightfully belong to them.
“Whatever the motivation, it has become easier and easier for a determined minority to throw sand in the gears of the legislative process,” Alterman writes. “It is therefore no coincidence that the 40 Republican senators with the ability to bottle up almost anything in the Senate represent barely a third of the U.S. population.”
Tomasky sees this shift as an inevitable one that will eventually bring liberals around to the realization that the great periods of change - Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society - took place after years of effort and many setbacks along the way.
Slower to come around to this view, Tomasky acknowledges, have been the vanguards of the liberal blogosphere: the Huffington Post, Firedoglake and, to an arguably lesser extent, The Daily Kos.
“People have to work through stages like that before they get to the point where they say that ‘this is not exactly what we thought it would be, but let’s just deal with it,’” Tomasky said in an interview with POLITICO. “I don’t know that the progressive community is at that stage yet, but people are getting there.”
Ironically, given the generally more pessimistic tone of his essay, Alterman sees a more immediate time of possibility than Tomasky - Obama’s second term, assuming there is one.
“This would be consistent with FDR’s strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010,” Alterman writes in his piece.
Still, others are wary of putting too much stock in the promise of 2012.
“I think that depends on what we build,” says Bob Borosage, president of the liberal Institute for America’s Future.
Borosage says that over the past 18 months, progressives have learned the hard way that they need to be more independent of the White House to realize the change that they are seeking.
The remedy for the problems that progressives face, Borosage says, lies in the need to create an equal and opposite force that can rival the enthusiasm of the tea party movement.
“If there is a progressive movement that is demanding change, driving the debate, challenging conservative Democrats and Republicans and challenging the White House, you might see a bolder agenda,” he says. “But it’s equally possible that this reform moment … that we miss it and conservatives come back with the same ideas they had when they drove us off a cliff.”
“It was always naive to expect a president to start a movement,” says Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor and co-editor of the liberal magazine, Dissent. “It’s a little bit like expecting a chief executive to start a union.”
© 2010 Politico.com
This is a comment that I found at CommonDreams. I am posting it here because I thought it was very good.
ma77hew July 11th, 2010 12:03 pm
First, if any “liberal” really looked at Obama’s actions, and really listened to what he said during the election and looked at the team/advisors around him and where the money that paid for the campaign came from you would have realized what to expect and none of this would be a surprise.
No Democrat will not get us out of this mess, as the mess is the Corporate control of our Government. The DNC is a major part of the problem just as the RNC is. They both feed on the corrupt nature of this system and lose power if the corrupt channels are uncovered and/or diminished.
True change takes more than listening to NPR and complaining. I think the Greeks get it, like the French and many other nations get it. They get in the street and cause some alarm as we will have to if we want to take our government back from the criminals that control it now. Considering the Patriot Act 1 & 2 and the War Powers Act and other recent destruction to our liberties it might be already too late. But seeing that most of the citizentry are fast asleep or busy blaming their neighbor or illegals (as they are told to), I am not very hopeful.
Have no fear Chrisy he won’t get a second term, I recall he said that Guantanamo Bay would be closed in 2009! Its July and the raghead prison is still thriving!
I wouldn’t write him off just yet. He has two + years to earn the respect and vote of Progressives and Greens who either voted for him and feel he lies or didn’t vote for him because he lied about FISA and we knew if he lied before becoming President that he would lie as President, which I may add he does.
Yet, we have other Progressives who make others feel like they are committing treason for daring to point out the truth. If one is trying to build trust with people lying doesn’t do it. Independents and Greens may stay home in 2012. That is why I pray that a real Progressive will have the courage to challenge him so that a Republican doesn’t win. Like Johnson was challenged in 68 which I believe helped him decide not to run again, I hope Obama has enough honor to step aside and allow a real Progressive who doesn’t lie all the time, have a chance to lead this nation. Obama doesn’t have the experience to be President. He ran to soon. He should have at least finished one term as Senator and either run for gov. first or at least stay in the Senate for a couple of terms. It was to soon and once trust is gone it is next to impossible to get that trust back.
Before anyone says I didn’t want Obama to succeed, I want to say that I wanted him to do well. He was born in Hawaii and went to the same school my nephew went to. I wanted him to succeed. Everyone who has connection to Hawaii wanted him to do well. Yet, how do I excuse his lying. I can’t. I know in the world today people are mocked because of their strong faith in God. Even the Catholic church is mocked and good Catholics who are just trying to do the best they can are made out to be evil racists because we try our best to live by the teachings of the Catholic church. Lying is a great sin. I will not overlook his lying or any of the lying that those in Congress or the other branches of government do.
Even though Progressives might be mad at me for saying this, but he should have let Hilary be President and he should have stayed in the Senate or run for gov. in IL to prepare him for the job of President and run in 2016. I supported Hilary and I would have voted for her, but Obama just never proved to me that he was worthy of my vote. Maybe it is because I am not part of the younger generation with all their high tech toys. I don’t even have a cell phone. I value being able to meet with the candidate and looking in his eyes as he speaks. Now it is almost impossible to get to see the candidates in person because the tickets are priced so high. Something is lost when your average hard working American doesn’t have a chance to hear and speak to the candidates in person. None of these fake town hall meetings, which are staged or these fake debates give people enough information to decide if that candidate is right for the job. Plus you add the soundbites and sloggans which don’t really mean a hill of beans, and the result is that people think they are voting for one thing only to find that they actually voted for someone who is totally different than they thought and Americans feel lied too. There are valid reasons why Congress and the President have low approval ratings.
I think his heart is in the right place, but he just doesn’t have the experience and knowledge needed to be the kind of leader the United States needs right now. Obama comes across as to weak. We are fighting a war against people who want to see the United States destroyed off the face of the earth along with Israel. Yet, he bows to them and comes across as a little boy who doesn’t have what it takes to fight this war that must be fought. We need a leader who is not afraid to fight and can lead men, women and children to all pull together as Americans to do what we must do to overcome that struggles that we are now facing. We need a man who will be honest, and who is willing to roll up his sleeves and fight too to save this country. We need a man who will lead by example and whose family will lead by example. I just don’t think Obama is a warrior who will fight for the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. I think Obama is more a diplomat and is more a President for times of peace, but we are fighting a war for our very survival and we need a warrior who is willing to fight.
We also need a man who is very smart and there too, I am disappointed in his actions. The things that he is doing don’t seem very smart to me, because in the long run adding more debt to debt is bad and weakens us. What happens when we as a nation go bankrupt and can’t pay back the loans? Spending our way into a good economy is wishful thinking. Yet, at the same time we can’t let Americans suffer, but there is so much pork in the Bills that doesn’t need to be there. There attitude is spend, spend, spend when we don’t have the money to spend, spend, spend.
We could use the all the money that is spent on Iraq to help pay down the debt and pay for domestic programs that are needed. We need to be smarter on how we spend the money and on that front too he has been a disappointment. He said he would be more transparent and that was another lie.
With every lie he speaks his nose gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I keep on hoping that someone will have the courage to challenge him and instead of allowing our government to continue to get more corrupted that they will be willing to fight to take this government back for the people. Now we have the best government money can buy, but not the best government for the American people.
I used to think that the best and brightest sought to work in government, but now it is pay to play and do what you are told to do and not what is best to do for this nation or the American people. Yes, there is valid anger that many Americans feel and it doesnt’ mean we are evil racists because we dare to speak the truth and are willing to fight to make it so that once again the best and the brightest work in government.