Feeling hopeless? Looking for someone to blame?
Anyone who wants to pretend that the President is blameless, that he's done everything right, that the fault lies entirely with his detractors, whether on the Right or the Left, is simply wrong.
By the same token, anyone who wants to lay all the blame at the President's feet is kidding themselves as well.
I take what appears to be a pretty unpopular view. That the fault lies not so much in our political "Stars" but in ourselves.
Anyone who votes for any candidate on the assumption that electing them will be enough to radically transform our politics is laboring under a delusion. You could put Bernie Sanders in the White House tomorrow and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference if you then sat back and waited for him to work political miracles. President Obama is not and never was a Bernie Sanders, so expecting him to work such a transformation is akin to expecting pigs to fly.
The real reason why we have fallen so short of what many hoped for is the same as it ever was: our inability to build a broad based, effective mass movement for change. Lacking that, we can elect "progressive" or "liberal" politicians until the cows come home but it will still amount to nothing more than the political equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.
A lot of us hoped that OWS might be the beginning of such a movement. That didn't pan out. The reasons for that failure are something that we should be talking about critically with an eye towards building a movement that could deliver on OWS' stillborn promise. Instead we seem to be focused on a sterile debate over whether to blame the President or his critics.
I think everyone, regardless of which side of this "debate" they come down on, needs to ask themselves a fundamental question: Is what I'm doing going to aid in energizing and mobilizing people for the kind of movement we need, or am I simply adding to their demoralization and consequent political apathy?