I keep reading about how liberals are totally ignored. How liberals are so done with President Obama. How liberals bled, sweated, and suffered to get Democrats elected only to be spit upon.
Shut out of this administration and Congressional policy making, they should just quit the Democratic Party, even though that'd just marganlize their political effectiveness.
The longer I look at how things have unfolded this year the more I think people are overreacting.
Liberal policies are setting the agenda, it's just reality sometimes makes things work out less than you hoped or dreamed it would be.
Why do I say liberals are setting the agenda? Well let's exam what's happened over the past year.
(1) The Elephant in the Room: Health care reform. The Senate sell out to insurance, the evisceration of the public option, the refusal to even give single payer advocates a seat at the health care reform negotiating table causes liberals to grind their teeth into a state of ruin about how unfair things are.
But ask yourself does any other political block in this country want to achieve universal coverage? Do evangelical conservative pro-life values voters, Club for Growth tax cutting champions, neo-con blow up the foreigners, anti-immigration Minutemen, and any other block of voters push for universal health care coverage? I don't think they do.
Why would Democrats want to revisit health care reform, when championing it helped cost them their decades long control of the House in 1994?
The money they get from insurance companies, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and others making money off of the current system, plus the defeat they suffered in 1994 should make this a dead issue.
The fact health care reform is at the table at all is because of liberal influence making it an issue Democrats have campaigned on in the 2004 and 2008 Presidential elections.
Health care is the largest segment of the economy. Getting something that large to change is never easy.
Is what's been done so far great? No, it's been maddeningly frustrating.
Good? Possibly. From Balloon Juice:
I’m honestly hard pressed to think of anyone who I can tolerate less than Lanny Davis, who I think really embodies everything wrong about the Democratic party and politics in general, but contained in this ridiculous piece blaming the left for the Coakley defeat is this:
The Democrats have a simple message on health care that has still not really gotten through: If our bill passes, you never have to worry about getting, or losing, health insurance for the rest of your life. How is it that so few people have heard that message?
http://www.balloon-juice.com/...
(2)Trust me when I say this is in no way gets done without liberal influence on politics.
Using a different pen for each letter of his name (to maximize the number of souvenir pens available for those involved in the bill's passage), President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law on January 29. (It became Public Law No. 111-2, 123 Stat. 5 (2009)).
That the nation's first African-American president was signing his first bill into law marked an important civil rights moment, but the bill itself marked another. Former President Bush had preemptively refused to sign such a law when it was first proposed almost two years ago, just as he had with a variety of other pieces of anti-discrimination legislation. (I have written in a previous column about Bush's preemptive strike against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, for example, which would have banned employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.)
President Obama's decision to proudly sign the Ledbetter Act thus signals not only more robust protection against pay discrimination, but also the potential for further improvements and expansion to our nation's civil rights laws. As Obama declared in his speech at the Ledbetter signing, the bill sends "a clear message that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody."
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/...
(3) Closing GITMO. It's happening. Not within the one year the President declared with this order:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to effect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (Guantánamo) and promptly to close detention facilities at Guantánamo, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice
http://www.whitehouse.gov/...
But the crazy resistance of Congressional politicians and the right-wing media to limit where they prisoners will be transferred has held things up, but hasn't stopped the drive to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and find a place on U.S. soil to move the prison.
The Obama administration is pushing back against calls to halt or delay closing the Guantanamo Bay prison in light of the failed Christmas Day terror attack, suggesting that shutting down the prison will undermine terrorist recruitment in the very network that claimed responsibility for last week's plot.
SNIP
Seniors officials told Fox News that nobody in the administration is reconsidering President Obama's plan to close Guantanamo Bay. Though the closure probably will not occur until 2011 due to a series of setbacks, officials said locking down Guantanamo is still in the "national security interest."
http://www.foxnews.com/...
The fact Obama signed this order on day one of his Presidency is because of the insistence of liberals. The fact they haven't taken the easy way out, in the face of opposition, and are still committed to closing the prison is because they know it is a bad symbol of our country no matter how much right-wingers whine about it.
(4) Green Jobs in the stimulus bill: a victory for conservatives? Nope. It's part of the liberal agenda.
WASHINGTON — Washington state will receive another piece of the $787 billion federal stimulus spending package, this time a $6 million grant to train workers in energy-efficient construction jobs.
The money will be used to pay for 4,700 veterans, disabled or low-income adults and other residents to get certified to work in green industries — one of the fields targeted for investment under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed by President Obama last February.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/...
U.S. President Barack Obama unveiled a $2.3 billion tax credit on Friday to boost jobs by promoting clean energy, as new data showed the country's unemployment rate remained stuck in the double digits.
Obama said the credit, from funds earmarked under a $787 billion stimulus package he signed last February, would create 17,000 U.S. jobs and be matched by an additional $5 billion in private capital.
http://news.cnet.com/...
(5) Cash for Clunkers. Huge success. Did wonders for the auto industry. Absolutely not a program conservatives embraced, if you listened to a bit of what Rush had to say or read what other luminary lights of right-wingdom were decrying about the horrors of a successful government program.
Is the base of the liberal revolution we were hoping for frustrating? Sure. Is it demoralizing when you don't get everything you want? Yup.
But to act like all the activity liberals have poured into politics, in the past few years, has been totally ignored is a major overreaction to President Obama's first year in office.
There are major policy initiatives being undertaken by this Administration, which do jibe with what liberals want done. Maybe it's not going to be exactly what we wanted or to the same degree we hoped a shift to the left would occur, but the fact anything is being attempted means liberals aren't barking alone in the wilderness.
Unless of course we decide one year is too long to wait to undo thirty years of Reaganomics, eight years of Bush & Co., and wander off into the wild barking at our President for not doing everything we want.