Democracy sucks. All these "elected" people from
various parts of the country and with all sorts of competing industry/financial backing pushing and pulling them in one direction or another makes things pretty sticky.
Even with an intelligent relatively progressive President, with his "big tent" party controlling the Senate and House, winning consensus during a horrific recession not of his making is hard. If not very, very hard.
See -- first the President and his party had to prevent a Depression. We all argued about how best to do it. But so far, so good. No Depression. Still a lousy economy and insane unemployment and defecits, etc...
And we all HATE his "economic" team because they're all cozy with Wall Street. But we do forget that Obama wanted and talked about a cabinet of "rivals" -- though he seems to be closer to Geithner and Summers than maybe we thought. Then again -- if Obama sent the wrong signals to Wall Street and came down hard on them immediately, when the Dow was at 7,000 and people were stuffing cash inside their mattresses and stockpiling cans of soup, maybe it would have made things that much worse. Maybe he knew that we had to restore confidence in the markets in order to begin to turn things around. Ripple effects. Save GM -- save thousands of jobs and keep auto parts suppliers (small businesses) open.
Then the President had to go and do health care reform -- because he loves big Phrma and big Insurance and hates people with no coverage and loves the drain on the economy that is health care in America. But see -- when he went after health care -- he did it AFTER a huge Stimulus, AFTER Wall Street Bail-outs, AFTER starting Cap-and-Trade DURING a rise in unemployment. So...centrist Dems from various parts of the country and who have special interests to protect RESISTED. That's the tricky thing about 3 branches of government and a horrific economic situation.
Big Change is HARD. In the best of times, it's tough. What's Bill Clinton's legacy? <crickets> Tech boom, tech bubble, tech bubble burst and Monica. And Welfare Reform. And failure to reform Health Care. (pssst....Obama is doing what Clinton failed to do during a better economy and NO WARS!).
So stick around, keep fighting, keep demanding Obama be true to progressive principles -- reform Wall Street, build the economy in a real way, pass meaningful health reform, (not perfect, but significant) and bring down unemployment, improve our schools, build a greener economy (he is), and somehow get us out of the mess in Afghansistan sooner than later.
Whatever you do -- anyone, all you naysayers and critics and pessimists and grannydocs and slinkerwinks and nyceves's and kos' and huffingtons and mahers' -- don't quit. It's a long slog toward a better America. The future is bright. It's just a little cloudy now. But we are this massive ship at sea, not adrift, just navigating stormy waters, trying to turn toward what we all know is a bright horizon, a rising sun? Fight fight fight but give Presient Obama a chance, some years, to get it right. If he fails, then throw him out. But for what you all want for this country, it's going to require more than one term. So fuel up over the holiday for the last 22 miles of this marathon.