Note: I'm the author of President Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union, but I wasn't part of the Obama campaign or the Obama administration.
After a year in office, Barack Obama has seen his popularity plummet and disillusionment rise. But Barack Obama hasn't failed the progressive movement; the progressive movement has failed Obama.
Progressives haven't built a progressive force to counter the massive conservative reaction to Obama. We couldn't even save Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts. We have allowed the far right to define our political debate, often in insane ways.
It's easy to blame Obama, and many progressives have lined up to denounce him. But they've got the wrong target. Obama isn't the one standing in the way of progressive reform, he's the messenger telling the left that they've failed to create a movement that exerts any power in American politics.
The truth is that the first year of Obama's presidency was one of tremendous progressive accomplishments. We forget that because the biggest accomplishment, the $789 billion stimulus package, came so early in his administration.
The stimulus package alone would exceed the accomplishments of many two-term presidents. In the face of a massive recession, one even worse than most people imagined at the time, Obama got a spectacular bill passed in record time with monumental results. Compare the $789 billion stimulus package to what Bill Clinton did in 1993, admittedly in the face of a much less severe recession. Clinton proposed a $19.5 billion economic stimulus package, but only got $4 billion to extend unemployment benefits.
The stimulus helped push the economy out of a recession and substantially cut unemployment from where it would have gone otherwise. It provided a massive investment in public infrastructure. The only mistake Obama made was trying to accurate depict the economic consensus at the time, instead of engaging in alarmism about the dire state caused by the Bush recession. But nothing Obama did could live up to the exaggerated expectations so many people had for him.
Where Obama failed, it wasn't for lack of trying. On the public option for health care reform, Obama was by far the leading national advocate for it, pushing the idea strongly in the summer of 2009. But even though the public option was always strongly popular in every poll, progressives failed to create a movement to counter the misinformation of the far right.
Progressives have failed on all counts: they have been unable to build any criticism from the left to counter the rising right-wing Tea Party Movement, and they have failed to create any enthusiasm for the success of Obama's progressive reforms. All they have done is engage in internal sniping, attacking the most progressive president in history for failing to live up to their exaggerated expectations.
Now, some progressives may argue that Obama should have been the leader of the progressive movement, the man who stood up to accomplish everything by personal proclamation what progressives failed to do
But Obama was never that kind of progressive. We should be honest about Obama and his administration: They are who we thought they were. Obama is a pragmatic progressive who is always willing to engage in compromise to accomplish his goals.
Obama's biggest mistake so far has been to appoint Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as his leaders of treasury and economic advisors, perhaps believing their fake promises that they had seen their mistakes and would embrace reform. If Obama had appointed Sheila Bair and Robert Reich or Joseph Stiglitz, he might have found some real reformers and not be forced to adopt his recent populist approach of taxing big banks. However, at the bottom point of the worst recession since World War II, Obama probably felt that he needed to stabilize financial markets rather than really reforming them. He certainly didn't have an effective movement on his left pushing for serious reforms.
Arianna Huffington wrote, "it's become painfully obvious that elected officials are not going to save us." Really? You thought elected officials in a corrupt system were going to save us, without any need to pressure them?
Perhaps I was naïve, too. The biggest hope I had for Obama was that he could single-handedly build a progressive movement as president that would fill in the yawning chasm we current face as progressives. It turns out that being president is kind of a difficult job, and Obama failed to revive the tattered mess of progressive politics while he was trying to fix the tattered mess of the entire federal government left to him after eight years of Bush Administration mismanagement.
I should have expected progressives to viciously denounce Obama. The left has been sniping at him from the start. I wrote a book about Obama as a pragmatic progressive in 2007 specifically because the left in America so thoroughly misunderstood him and the state of American politics. The left went from hating Obama to seeing him as their political savior and then back to hating him again once their inevitable disappointment with practical politics became real.
Astonishingly, while Obama is being eviscerated by the left for not being progressive enough, Democrats are looking at massive losses in 2010 because political experts say that these limited measures are too left-wing. The problem isn't really popularity. People hate Republicans even more than the Democrats. The problem is an enthusiasm gap. The right-wing nuts are desperately trying to stop progressive reforms by throwing Democrats out of office. And progressives are sitting on their asses, helping the far right-wing by pouting about how little they've gotten.
The Teabaggers may seem like a bunch of racist, conspiratorial morons pushing inaction in the face of the greatest economic crisis in America in more than a half-century. But compared to progressives, the Teabaggers are brilliant. They actually understand how to influence politics. The progressive movement is responding to the most progressive president in history by denouncing him at every turn, trying to stop his legislative efforts, and using their mighty power of apathy to get rid of his marginal majority in Congress. Absolutely brilliant! Progressives couldn't accomplish any more for the Republican Party if Karl Rove became editor of Huffington Post.
If you think Obama has failed to push progressive policies with 60 votes in Senate, it's not going to get any better with 55 votes. It's going to get much worse. A political defeat for the Democrats isn't going to cause them to come to their senses, abandon their corporate masters, and fulfill the demands of the people for progressive reform. Electoral defeat is going to make move even more to the right, as Bill Clinton and Democrats did following the Republican Revolution of 1994.
2009 was the year of Obama, where all of politics centered around him. 2010 needs to be the year of us, when we build a progressive movement to defend Obama and give him the power to pursue progressive reforms rather than centrist compromises.
Crossposted at ObamaPolitics.