This diary started out as a comment in response to Jed Lewison's
article Obama stumps for jobs bill in Ohio to the chants of 'pass this bill'. Jed quoted Gannett:
To the chants of "pass this bill," President Barack Obama gave a litany of why Congress should pass his American Jobs Act, which was introduced this week.
Wow! Obama taking his case to the people, inspiring us, using the "bully pulpit" just like we thought he would as President? What a great idea! Too bad he wasn't doing that over the last couple years with health care, stimulus bill(s), the Dream act and other immigration reform, hypocritical GOP-led deficit reduction schemes, etc. ETC. I'd dearly hoped that he would, but I now see that that hope was childishly naive. Icons don't deliver, especially when they don't exist. Even little kids figure this out at some point, often around November or December, if you get my meaning.
I've been waiting for Obama to start stumping seriously for his agenda, and figured it was approaching now or never if he wanted to be reelected. His recent speeches, and all of the "hope and change" rhetoric of '08, is/was about winning, not a genuine indicator of how Obama has governed and intends to govern. I'd love to be wrong, but I wasn't born yesterday.
Candidate Obama was (and is) electrifying, inspiring, and able to win hearts and minds. I was certainly smitten in '08 and had high hopes. Instead, of course, President Obama has turned out to be mostly cautious, competent, calculating, compromising, centrist and corporatist. (I almost stuck "compassionate" in there, but that would have evoked "compassionate conservatism".) Remember how Evan Bayh, paragon of centrism, almost ran in '08? Remember why he didn't? He decided that Democratic voters would want a more transformational candidate. What irony, eh? As a friend of mine said, "Obama is more Evan Bayh than Evan Bayh is". Except when he's campaigning.
Don't get me wrong, I'll never be some sort of deluded or nihilistic Nader-voting kinda guy. Yes, yes, I'll do what I can to re-elect Obama, but I won't -- I can't -- generate the idealistic enthusiasm I had in '08 that made me stay out knocking on doors till my feet were freezing, any more than I could -- or would -- fake an orgasm. It's true that Obama has been a pretty good president by today's standards. I just wish that supporting him didn't feel like the old "vote the lesser evil" standard that I've wearily tolerated ever since I started voting in the early '80's.
Why do Republican presidents, compared to Democrats with substantially larger mandates, get so much more of their agendas passed? It's not because Democrats are spineless. Obama is tough as nails, and so was Clinton. Clinton didn't have as much of a mandate, but Obama did, and could have won a lot more of a progressive agenda had he stumped for it -- speaking to us as adults, appealing to our better natures; remember how great that was? -- from the beginning. No, the reality is that Democratic pols want to govern further right than they campaigned, because they have to follow the money. So, only with campaign finance reform and other measures will we, blah blah blah, our future, empowerment, hope, change, blah blah.
(Doesn't it suck how Obama has ruined oratory for everyone? The next time someone gives a soaring, progressive speech, the cynical response will be "well, he's just pulling an Obama".)
All right, I won't go any further, since this is turning into a rant. But it was a real wake-up call for me to realize that Democratic politicians who vote for right-wing measures aren't spineless; they're fully pragmatic and know exactly what they're doing. The "Dems are pathetic" meme is bullshit. Lots of people already see that, but it was only last year that I finally figured it out, clearly and without the blinders on. Call it the Democrat's version of realizing there's no Santa Claus. Ain't I clever.
But I'm not all pouty and disengaged about this; I'm just a little more realistic in planning ahead. At least Obama's Supreme Court picks will be very helpful, likely to reject the idea that money equals speech and so on. His health care program may spur support for further reform along the lines of a well-funded Medicare for all. Obama is doing some good stuff, but he's not going to lead the charge for progressive change. We have to do that as best we can: keep organizing, grooming candidates at the local level, and primarying from the left. It's just gonna be a far more incrementalist struggle than lots of us assumed in '08. Given all that is at stake, failure is not an option, but success will take substantially longer than I'd figured three years ago. The fact that there's no Santa Claus simply means that we have work harder to create our own gifts.