The amount of Obama and Dem love by progressives STILL astounds me.
What has Obama really done since taking power? On issue after issue, he's gone against the progressive wishes and almost followed the neocon line verbatim.
This latest so called progressive achievement with health care wasn't progressive in the least. Wow, an expansion of privatized health insurance! Funny, it didn't sound as great when Mitt Romney enacted it or when Republicans introduced it 15 years ago. [And I'm not even saying the health care bill was that bad, but like on almost every other issue, progressives never get what we really asked for]
Afghanistan? More war you say? JOY. Tax cuts too, right? yep. Warrantless spying on citizens? You bet. Drill Baby Drill? Yessir. Habeas Corpus? Patriot Act? the list goes on and on and on.
And yeh, i'm sure progressives can point to a handful of tiny policy wins which Obama gave us, but for every win we've got five losses. I thought this was supposed to be our time to govern? Why should we be accepting crumbs when we are supposed to have near complete control of the government?
I don't know whats happened to the progressive base - but it seems like we have lowered our expectations SO MUCH on Obama and the Dems that anything which is even 1% to the left of George W Bush we cheer like mad.
And whose fault is all this? we are at fault. It is because we progressives are too easily pleased by the crumbs Obama and the Dems feed us that they only feed us crumbs. If we actually demanded more than crumbs, we could get more than crumbs.
Democrats have learned this. They have learned that they can take advantage of us and never face repercussions. That they really only have to appeal to the center and right wing since the left will always vote for them.
It was thought by some that the Rahm Emanuel strategy of taking away the public option would piss off the progressive base enough for them to actually do something about it. Well, it turns out Emanuel was vindicated, because the progressive base is apparently docile.
And for us real progressives, this is a major problem, for it means that they know they can get away with feeding us fewer and fewer crumbs, for they know we can always be taken for granted.