All he's done (seven weeks before taking office) is...propose a public works spending package of staggering size and substance. And embrace without any equivocation the Chicago door-and-window-plant workers while simultaneously calling national attention to the justness of their cause. And appoint as head of Veterans Affairs a general whose career was tossed into the crapper when he spoke the truth during the ramp-up to war in Iraq (and thus repudiated the Bush-Rumsfeld Pentagon legacy).
As the MSM television chattering classes continue tediously to manufacture accounts of a mass uprising on the Left that isn't happening--and fosters the myth that progressives are trapped in an endless political childhood (bitter, unrealistic ideologues who throw shattering tantrums when they don't get everything they want from Santa Claus)--someone needed to refuke this MSM grotesquerie.
And Guardian America's Michael Tomasky has done it
Update: Joe Klein weighed in on Tomasky's piece on Swampland. (He likes the green infrastructure spending, loves Gates at Defense.)Swampland
So, for any progs out there in need of talking points for use in shooting down this MSM meme, here are a few from Tomasky's column:
Obama is still seven weeks away from taking office but has already signaled that he's going to do grand thing, huge things – dare I say heretofore unimaginable things. A half-trillion dollar (at least; some suspect it may end up being more like a trillion) jobs-and-infrastructure program, which he wants to enact as soon as possible after he takes office? Liberals have complained for decades – yes, decades, since the 1970s – about the creaky state of America's bridges and roads and the need for more spending on transit. Ditto the schools.
And here's the denouement following that Act I setup:
And here comes a president who is about to do something about all this, and do it more grandly than most liberals would have dared to imagine just a few months ago. And do it immediately. And he's not liberal enough? Please. If President Obama were to pass a trillion dollar jobs-and-infrastructure bill and, Heaven forbid, drop dead on his elliptical machine in March, that single act alone would be enough to make him one of the most progressive presidents in the history of the country.
There's this comparison of Obama's courageous support of the Chicago plant workers to FDR's silence in response to striking Flint autoworkers in 1937:
In 1936 and 1937, after his re-election, Roosevelt – as the incumbent president who'd just won 46 states (out of our then 48) and 63% of the vote and was thus in a far more powerful position than Obama is today – could not bring himself to utter a word in support of the sit-down strikers in Flint, Michigan trying to join the auto workers' union.
It was an improvement on previous practice, to be sure, that Roosevelt said nothing. His predecessors would have ordered in the troops. But he couldn't offer even a rhetorical pat on the back. Obama has brought these people national attention and sent the signal that, with respect to treatment of workers and related issues like grotesque executive compensation, on which he has also spoken out forcefully, we are going to be entering a different era. I'll send you a gold-embossed copy of Mark Penn's latest book if you can realistically persuade me that a president-elect Clinton would have said anything like what Obama said.
And finally, after pointing out that appointments such as Gates grant Obama "the room to operate and to isolate the political opposition," this cogent summation:
But he's still weeks away from office and he's already backing up powerless working people, talking about hundreds of billions in government dollars being committed to building up the country, tackling health care and climate change, reiterating that deficit reduction is a low priority right now, standing by his pledge to draw down in Iraq and apparently planning to go to Cairo (probably) to give a speech on America's new relationship to the world – a move, again, that I can't conceive of any president of my lifetime having the guts to consider making in his first hundred days.
The cable shows have hours to fill, and bloggers know that if they complain they might well be asked to help fill them. But disappointment...anger? If what we've seen so far be compromise, I say serve me seconds.
The statement I boldfaced is intriguing. I think Tomasky probably meant to preface it with a "some" bloggers or a "many" bloggers, but I think he's got a valid point. There's certainly some bad faith opportunism operating out here in the progressive blogosphere.