Dear Mr. President,
Maybe I know the wrong Democrats, but I don't know a single one who thinks your September job proposals, fine as they probably will be, have a chance in hell of being enacted.
How do you plan to run next year? Will you promise that if you win the Republicans will suddenly start cooperating with you?
That if you somehow get a super-majority in the Senate you'll really be able to finally get the country on the right track, unlike the last time you had a super-majority? That this time you'll actually believe what the Keynesian economists tell you when they tell you you're asking for far too little to get a real recovery?
Will you finally understand that Democrats are not disappointed in you because you don't sing Peter Paul and Mary songs on a nylon string guitar to soothe us to sleep?
We're disappointed in you, sir, because you didn't fight to get the things done that would have gotten America on the road to a real recovery by 2011? You didn't even try to appear to be fighting. That's pretty goddamned disappointing.
You'll be amazed to know that this guy Paul Krugman wrote it over and over: your stimulus was too small, the recovery would poop out by 2011, unemployment would stay high because of it. An actual economist predicted it, and he wasn't the only one. And he wasn't pulling numbers out of his ass. What are you going to say in the campaign next year? "I'll get rid of those mooks who told me that half the stimulus was all we needed!" Nah, you won't even get rid of them, much less promise to and then break another promise. "Vote for me and I'll keep the same advisors."
There are fewer of us every day, but some of us remember when Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act WITHOUT a super majority in the Senate. Presidents CAN fight for Democratic causes and win. I saw it happen. Not liberal causes, not progressive causes. Just Democratic causes.
I think you can win next year. You'll certainly get my vote, even if I have to wear the same clothespin on my nose that I wore when I voted for Dukakis.
But if you do win, what's going to be different from the way things are now?
Will your pundit apologists, the ones who glibly and falsely claim that we voted for an Obama of our own imagining, will they pick up their next lecture fee and book deal by saying "I don't know why the people who voted for him thought things would be any different this time around."
I don't have any illusions that you'll read this message from my heart. I doubt you read anything by an actual Democratic voter anymore. Worse, if you did read this, you won't exactly be looking for ways to cheer me up.
But as the days of September meander by, and your bus tour of depressed areas and your jobs proposals get less and less news time, here's the one thing that'll make me feel like things may get better:
Every now and then, while the GOP trashes you and ignores your proposals every single day - every now and then - just occasionally don't blame "Congress" or even "some in congress."
Every now and then PLEASE blame the goddamned Republicans OUT LOUD. Just once, give 'em some consequences.
For me.