A year ago at Netroots Nation, President Bill Clinton promised that if health care reform passed, Democrats would see a 10-point bump in the polls the following day. It didn't happen.
Here's why --
In the past, the only contact most people would have with the legislative process was the final product -- big headlines proclaiming that a historic bill had just passed and signed into law by the president. But in this media-saturated world of today, that doesn't happen anymore.
Rather, we got an intimate look at the sausage-making process. We saw what the various pieces of legislation could've been. We saw that the good stuff (like the public option or drug reimportation or job spending or comprehensive immigration support) had a great deal of public support. We saw those provisions stripped away (or ignored), one by one, as various industry lobbyists had their say. We saw people like Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus humored by the Democratic leadership and the White House. We saw Democrats "negotiate" with Republicans who openly scoffed at the idea of compromise, and openly bragged about their delaying tactics. We saw Ben Nelson throw his periodic hissy fits, while (openly!) extracting taxpayer-funded bribes in order to get his support. We saw how "bipartisanship" seemed a more important ideal to Democrats and the White House than "passing the best legislation possible." And we saw our party play the role of "deer in headlights" as the teabaggers took over the debate, on issue after issue.
So when the various pieces of legislation have passed, whether its the health care or financial reform laws or whatever, the sense hasn't been jubilation, but relief.
And relief isn't a positive emotion. It's a negative one. And negative emotions don't help close intensity gaps, or motivate base progressives into working hard for those very Democrats that gave us merely adequate legislation, when we could've had great.
Much of this stuff is definitely "first step" kind of stuff. Nothing here is to suggest surrender or dismissal for whatever accomplishments have been made. But we were asked to hope, and we did, and our broken legislative system (like the Senate filibuster) made cynics of too many people, too quickly. As Nate wrote:
Nevertheless, I suspect that for most liberals, any real sense of progress has now been lost. Yes, the left got a good-but-not-great health care bill, a good-but-not-great stimulus package, a good-but-not-great financial reform plan: these are a formidable bounty, and Obama and the Democratic Congress worked hard for them. But they now read as a basically par-for-the-course result from a time when all the stars were aligned for the Democrats -- rather than anything predictive of a new direction, or of a more progressive future. In contrast, as should become emphatically clear on November 2nd, the reversion to the mean has been incredibly swift.
The White House may be losing its cool over this stuff, but let's remember -- it was they who raised expectations. There would always be consequences if they failed to deliver.