I will start by apologizing for hyping up my own story from 2009: Anyone could do better than Obama.
In it I argue with a tiny bit of sarcasm that radical lefties who frequent Daily Kos and where so angry at Obama for not pursuing the public option for the healthcare plan would have done a much better job if they were the POTUS.
In it I argue that the things the radical left asks for, like have Obama pressure the senate and pressure the leader of the House, back then it was Reid, to pass the public option, is not a simple political maneuver.
Although I used a lot of words, the comment section had many great comments (a total of 210) that show the mindset of the radical left with some great replies by the more knowledgeable calm minds. One of the lucid comments reads like this:
Half the items on the liberal’s agenda list would require near dictatorial power. It would really suck if the pendulum swings back and we got a president with dictatorial power. The problem is the Senate, not the president. The president is exercising his executive power. It's a balance of power, and if the legislature is not on board, none of that shit can get done.
I urge you to read those comments and then think about answers to these questions:
If you are appalled at the lengths that Trump goes to push his Trumpcare agenda in the senate, do you still think that Obama should have coerced the senate and Reid into passing the public option?
Do you think Obama should have kept pressing for it and give speeches and interviews to the media about it? Or do you think that advocating for a public option in the media, through interviews and speeches (politicians did not use twitter back then), and then failing to pass it may only have cost him to lose support among many different fractions of American voters and make future legislation more difficult to pass?
Do you think that Obama did the right thing in not pushing for the public option, at least in public, and instead made sure that the ACA gets signed into law?
In hindsight, if you were one of those who was mad about not getting the public option (I was, initially), would you say that Obama’s decision was probably the smartest given the circumstances?
Finally, will we all please learn from these historic events and admit that having a president who respects the balance of powers and the constitution and implements small positive, progressive incremental changes is something to cherish and applaud, and that hoping for a revolutionary lefty president who makes of America a bastion of liberal glory is based on stupid and reckless expectations because he will have to use dictatorial tactics to get things done?