I think most of us here have seen the kick-arse, totally on fire speeches our President has made this past week. They've been highlighted in lots of diaries here and I'd like to refer back to BWD's from the other day, but not for the speech. I'm referring back to hers because of the Andrew Sullivan article she also cited. Understandably, it's been drowned out because the speeches were just that good. But it definitely merits a read.
And given the legacy he inherited, what he has done is simply not enough to perform an economic or political or cultural miracle. That's the brutal truth and we have to face it. And if Americans thought they were voting for a savior, rather than a pragmatic president, they were deluding themselves.
Sullivan does quote from the speech, though:
Eight million Americans lost their jobs in this recession. And even though we’ve had eight straight months of private sector job growth, the new jobs haven’t been coming fast enough. Now, here’s the honest truth, the plain truth. There’s no silver bullet. There’s no quick fix to these problems. I knew when I was running for office, and I certainly knew by the time I was sworn in, I knew it would take time to reverse the damage of a decade worth of policies that saw too few people being able to climb into the middle class, too many people falling behind. We all knew this. We all knew that it would take more time than any of us want to dig ourselves out of this hole created by this economic crisis.
And there's the rub: Reagan was elected in 1980. Since that time, we've had one two-term democratic president, roughly smack-dab in the middle of republican presidencies, who had a legendarily hostile Congress. Delay learned everything he knew from Gingrich. So, the horrifically myopic policies of eight years of Shrubya are but a drop in the bucket of roughly three decades of GOP misrule. This ship can only be righted so quickly, as Sullivan points out:
Maybe in power, by some miracle, the Tea Party Republicans will actually propose the long-term massive cuts in entitlements they claim to believe in. But I don't believe it for a second. I don't believe they are in any way serious about spending restraint and are only serious about their bewilderment at the real America where racial, religious and cultural diversity is a fact, where illegal immigration has been plummeting, where gay marriage is winning, where legal abortion will never go away, and where the new empire the last administration embarked upon has bankrupted us for a generation at least.
And this, in the end, must be what our politics is about: substantive policy responses to profound crises inherited from the past.
...In the end, these difficult practical decisions will count because they have to count.
Damn straight. Rome wasn't built in a day and they actually did have emperors. Obama is not going to be able to right the wrongs of decades of mismanagement in 20 months and he certainly can't do it with weakened Congressional majorities. We already have history working against us; midterms for a first-term president are usually unkind to the sitting president's party.
So, since we do understand the history, let's not doom ourselves to repeat it. You want a hair-on-fire, must-take-action moment? Forget issue X, Y, and Z and calling Congress: shoring up Dem majorities in Congress is the single most important thing any one of us can do right now. And we've got 52 days to burn every last hair on our heads. This is serious leave-it-all-on-the-road time; Obama won't be able to move an inch leftward if we don't fight to the end for our Dem candidates this fall.
Yes, I know; many of them are flawed if not outright repugnant. But the time to vote one's conscience is in the primary; during the general, it's time to vote strategically, i.e., whatever it takes to keep the GOP from completely thwarting any further progress. That means voting for and/or supporting the Dem candidates we've got, like Reid for example, warts and all. Speaker Boehner and/or Majority Leader McConnell simply will not do.
Is the frustration and disaffection of the American electorate real and valid? Absolutely. I am in no way attempting to diminish the very real and pressing concerns of people still being hard hit from the economic meltdown; it can become easy to lose hope and start believing no amount of effort makes a difference. But we know that's not true and these are precisely the types of people/voters who need GOTV outreach.
I encourage everyone to visit the election series round-ups going on here lately. Steve Singiser self-deprecatingly refers to his as the fishwrap, but it's always chock full of good info. There is also the delightful Election Diary Rescue, a daily round-up of election action diaries. plf515 has been doing a regular series of diaries such as this. I'm not sure if they have a special tag to collect them or what, but you can always just hotlist his ass. Votesmart has a really cool resource, too; you can look up candidates state-by-state and see which races have, say, caught the attention and funding of national GOP PACs.
Has Obama's record been perfect? Of course not. But doing our part extends well beyond canvassing and voting for President every four years; if we don't pull out all the stops this fall, we are equally responsible for what happens between now and 2012. Doing our part will let him do better by us; let's at least get his back enough to keep the historical trends at bay. It is totally on us to kick ass and deliver for Congress this midterm.
As Sullivan said:
In all this, the president deserves constructive criticism, but also moral and political support in engaging actual problems with actual solutions. Those on the left and in the middle who once saw his potential have no reason to abandon him now. If you were one of them, he needs you and this country needs you now more than ever before.