...if you want progressive change, that is.
Look. Lets dispense from arguing the substance of the Obama administration. We've done that here to death. Most folks here are entrenched in our positions. We talk past each other. So lets say for a moment that I concede the awfulness of Obama (I don't - I happen to think very highly of him, but for the sake of this diary...lets say that we can all agree on this point).
Okay. So we are all on the same page, right? No need to gum up the comments with the usual arguments. Now lets talk about building a progressive movement. And since this is my diary, allow me to start that conversation with a personal perspective.
I remember my first few weeks at Dkos. I've been around here a while. I lurked pretty much from the beginning. Not long after the 2004 election I jumped in. Back in those days we were all pretty demoralized here. Far worse than we are today. We believed that the GOP was virtually unbeatable then. The notion that we'd be arguing just a few years later about whether a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate ought to be delivering more would have seemed almost unthinkable in those days.
We would occupy our time doing things like trying to develop an elevator speech for what progressivism was. We were under no illusion that voters were hankering for a Wellstone/Kucinich/Sanders/Feingold model liberal. We hoped that perhaps for another Bill Clinton - someone who could convince just enough independent voters to side with us. We imagined grooming someone like Mark Warner or Evan Bayh for the role. Maybe even Hillary Clinton - if America could be made to be ready for something as radical as that. That seemed doubtful. We had been losing an awful long time by that point - and take Ross Perot and incumbency (combined with a tech bubble) out of the picture and a lot of us suspected that our ideas had not actually hadn't actually held sway in a national election since Jimmy Carter.
Our conversations then were about making the progressive case to America. We imagined a long, hard slog to parity with the GOP. This community buzzed with purpose in those days.
Then George W. Bush fucked it all up.
He fucked it up by fucking the country so badly that they turned to us in reaction. They gave us congress. Then it began to look like they were going to give us the White House too. And we responded like by letting all of our pent-up frustration out. We went fucking nuts.
We became very sure of ourselves. We found polls that indicated that America wanted exactly what we wanted and ignored the ones that said otherwise. We had a primary war in which the lines became drawn between the false choice of incrementalism vs. having it all, baby! We parsed the health-care plans of our candidate as if it were Christmas eve and we were awarding someone the role of Santa Claus.
Most in this community favored Edwards for his populist rhetoric. Others favored Kucinich. Hillary Clinton was the establishment and Barack Obama was too conciliatory. We had no need for conciliation. Blood was in the water. We wanted a leader who could (and would) deliver our agenda.
I was an Obama partisan. I still remembered the dark days. I did not buy the notion that a savior could come in and bequeath us with universal health care, the end of poverty, the end of global warming and the end of all Republican influence on government. I was looking for a candidate who could start a generational shift toward progressivism, not one who would complete it instantly. I saw Obama as our best hope. I saw in him a guy who could stand as a demarcation point away from the last paradigm, allowing us to begin creating a new one. I was told over and over again that I was a starry-eyed cultist who could not see the truth of what I was buying, but I saw Barack Obama quite clearly. I knew what I was voting for - a chance to grab the heavy steering wheel and finally start turning the slow-moving ship of state towards the left. And when it became clear that Obama was to be our candidate, then our President - I hoped to have everyone here pulling that wheel together. Instead most here jeered at Obama for not being strong enough to bear it alone. And when the economy tanked and the GOP made it clear that they were willing to opt out of governance rather than allow us a successful Democratic President, folks here decided that the best way to help this President succeed was to oppose him from the left.
These are my impressions of what happened. No doubt yours are different. Lets not get stuck there.
Let me again reiterate my concession from the beginning of this diary. Imagine we all agree that Obama has done a bad job, or is too weak. Whatever you want to accuse him of, lets say we all agree.
My question to you now is, do you really think opposing him from the left will bear the fruit you want? If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing you've always done and expecting a different result, is it not insanity to think that our continued opposition will lead to anything other than what we've seen already? Hasn't Obama made it perfectly clear that he will largely ignore it?
Do you honestly think you can change Obama?
If you answered "Not more than around the margins" you win a kewpie doll. What we've got is what we've got. i happen to think it is pretty damned good. A lot of you think it is horrible. We will never agree. But what we can agree on is the fact that we ought to maximize the usefulness of this situation.
In the early 80s conservatives had a President that was letting some of them down too. He was raising taxes, spending like crazy and fretting about proliferation. But they clapped louder. They needed a re-brand after Watergate and they found the perfect actor to play the part of realignment President. They made a useful fiction of him, and eventually Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and the tea party would move the overton window further to the right. but all of that sprung from their willingness as a party and as a movement to accept Ronald Regan as their demarcation point. To swallow their disappointment and instead work to gain yardage.
Whether you are a person like me who sees Barack Obama as the best President of your lifetime, or a disaffected progressive who sees him as the greatest disappointment of your lifetime, it just does not matter. We all need Barack Obama to be a successful President. We need him to win a second term and be seen as the guy who got the ball rolling our direction. We need young voters to see a Democraic party on the march. We need him to be a foundation to build upon rather than a subject of endless division and consternation.
Clap louder. Clap even if you don't mean it. You have nothing to gain from sitting on your hands.