Ezra says a lot of what I've been thinking:
… insofar as liberals focus too much on Obama, the appropriate criticism there is not that they're too interested in the president or too bullish on government's ability to plug state budget gaps, but that they're focusing on the president because it's easy and interesting to do, while the actual problem is a Republican Party that would prefer a grim economy and an undistinguished president going into the 2010 election and a commentariat that's more interested in talking about political problems than policy problems. In fact, the guy who best channeled liberal frustrations on this issue was, well, Barack Obama:
Now, I understand disappointment with the President. I feel it right now quite acutely with regard to cap-and-trade/carbon-pricing, and the President missing some opportunities to lean forward on the single most important issue of our time.
But it strikes me as somewhat counter-productive to primarily attack the guy who's mostly with you, instead of the people who oppose you all the time.
And it's definitely counterproductive to say that the mostly-with-you guy is every bit as intractable and hopeless as the always-against-you crowd. “Well, he's just another corporate Democrat.” Well, even if that were so, so what? What are you going to do, take your ball and go home? You can go home, but the game goes on anyway.
Really, it's just time for all of us to grab a mop. Even if we don't think the mopper-in-chief is mopping enough, or the right spots, or fast enough.
…but i think klein misses some of the dynamic in play here.
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p>a lot of the reason obama is taking flack has to do with the environment from which he came, and the fact that a lot of his voters were not democrats.
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p>after bush, who isn’t cynical beyond belief?
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p>when obama says “i’ll close guantanamo in a year”, and it doesn’t happen, he’s gonna take the hit on that, even if it is, to some extent, the fault of the rs.
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p>to make it worse, a fair number of obama’s voters aren’t democrats: instead, they just voted for obama, and that means if things aren’t going according to the plan they thought they voted for, obama takes the hit.
Hayward wants to cap the errant gusher and clean things up, no?
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p>…
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p>Obama asked for my support, and made certain promises. Once in office, he proceeded with all sorts of really bad stuff:
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p>- Continuing banker bailouts by risking $12+ Trillion of our tax money, with zero new regulations to safeguard that risk, and little in the way of consumer protections
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p>- Continuing secret prisons and endless imprisonment without judicial recourse
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p>- Continuing “extraordinary rendition”
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p>- Turning a blind eye to war crimes
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p>- Continuing warrantless wiretapping
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p>- Hyper-prosecution of whistle blowers
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p>- Bailouts to health insurers and backroom deals with Pharma, hospitals, and docs, leading to a health care law so great that Obama doesn’t want us experience it until after his shot at re-election
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p>- Extrajudicial assassination of American citizens
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p>- Drill, baby, drill
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p>And so forth.
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p>And where’s that Project Apollo for renewable energy that Obama promised? And the unprecedented transparency?
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p>I think people are angry that 17 years of quiet compromise have brought us to where we are now. As Dr. Dean said:
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p>”We voted for change we believe in. And if we don’t get it, we’ll have more change in 2010″.
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p>Obama’s in charge. Not only do many of us feel that he is failing to create change – he’s also failing to at least fight the good fight. The greatest orator of our time has packed in his staggering persuasive powers, and turned into a dispassionate version of Bill Clinton.
the problem with your quote from Ezra is that liberals aren’t focusing on Obama because it’s “easy and interesting to do.” They are focusing on Obama because they elected him, and therefore (a) they expect him to do what he said he’d do during the campaign, since that was the basis for voting for him, and (b) it’s not unreasonable to think that publicly expressing dissatisfaction with his current position might cause him to reevaluate, since he needs them for reelection.
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p>Of course, the larger problem is the absurd GOP. But liberals have exactly zero ability to sway them; to the extent that liberals publicly express dissatisfaction with where the GOP is, that only helps the GOP raise money and further their own reelection prospects, because if liberals don’t like them, their base will be delighted.
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p>Stated otherwise, you apply pressure where you might have influence. In our case, that is with Obama. The GOP doesn’t care what we think; Obama does. Or, at least, he should.
As an area where there have been positive steps forward, but the only reason DADT is being considered this year at all is that GLBT activists kept up the outside pressure and worked with members of Congress like Patrick Murphy and Carl Levin to get to a point where Congress was going to vote on repeal regardless and the Obama Administration wanted to jump on board.
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p>We should all grab mops, definitely, but there is nothing inconsistent about supporting Obama when he is doing the right thing and being critical and applying pressure when he’s not. I do think there’s a world of difference between where we are with Obama and where we would have been with McCain, but there have been areas in which Obama has been very disappointing, civil liberties being a very potent example for me.
…in all of this is the question of pressuring the democratic congress, who has been a tremendous souirce of disappointment; that’s a question that is all too often ignored, which seems to be the basis for klein’s comment about being a bit too fixated on obama.
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p>To be sure… However, the thinly veiled assertion by Douhat is that Obama is simply not effective, no matter his earnest intent… and that this is both a betrayal and an obstacle to further liberal ascendency. It’s the same old horse race reportage dressed up as a facade of moral quandry… Douhat, for reasons I can’t even fathom and using logic I don’t understand, poses this situation as existential threat to both liberals agenda and Obamas chances… rather than simply the present twist in an ongoing process.
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p>Adult liberals, and the adults in the white house, will always try to pressure and sway each other in the time- and constitutionally-honored custom of the electors and the elected. This is most certainly nothing out of the ordinary. And liberals have long had to take the long view… and we’ve certainly been in straits more dire than this… And liberals are clear-eyed and sober about the real obstacles in the path of Obama. What’s new is Douhats insistence that that one part, one snapshot in time, somehow illuminates the whole…
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p>And I think he does. And I think, as I stated above, adults at play here are clear-eyed and sober-minded about obstacles and realities. All that is just to say that both Klein and Douhat, frankly, are childishly naive in their writing: Both exist in the realm of a hazy ‘what ought to be’, which would an be emminently acceptable mode of inquiry if they didn’t waste time in lament and moral handwringing over how very vast is the distance between what is and what ought to be…
No, but primary him at least to keep him honest. I’m not committed to support such a challenge, but I’d be more open to a Howard Dean candidacy in 2012 than I was in 2004.
What would that accomplish except a 1980 redux?
who is more responsive to the public interest and who keeps more of the campaign promises s/he makes to the public.
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p>Simply saying that the status quo will be a winner is not convincing. Think Martha Coakley…
I was two so I’m going on what I’ve read rather than remember, but it seems Kennedy didn’t fully embrace Carter plus there were other factors working against him, like Iran and the economy.
McClatchy newspapers 18 June:
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p>Hmm.