I feel like there is a huge disconnect between the way I see the world and the way a lot at Daily Kos do and it's incredible to me because policy wise I'm fairly certain we share the same liberal values. brooklynbadboy's diary was clear and thoughtful and precise and I fundamentally disagree with him.But more importantly, this seems like a less inflamatory way of saying what Joan Walsh did, people shouldn't focus on 2012 but on what's happening in the states. And the extreme is the post at Americablog stating whomever primaries the President will become the next Democratic President (because, yeah, they'll get the black vote for sure, or it won't matter by then).
Instead of being the public leader, the transformational leader, that many of us expected, the leader he campaigned to be, he's shrunk. He's just become another Washington insider playing the insider game. The insider game has him making choices between shutting down the government and stepping on the poor. The insider game has him choosing between tax cuts for the wealthy or declaring war on the unemployed middle class. The insider game has convinced him there is almost nothing he can do about the housing crisis. The insider game has him appointing a corporate CEO who ships jobs overseas as the head of his domestic jobs council. The insider game has him appointing the very same people who ran the economy into the ground as his principal economic advisers. He told us of a Washington that was broken, but he was quite mistaken. Washington works just fine. Just not for regular people.
This morning I read with anger a post that said Barack Obama needs to learn how to negotiate from Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton failed to get health care reform of any kind past and his failure NECESSARILY meant the next stab at reform would be more modest; just as a failure for Obama meant NEXT TIME progressives would have to move the ball farther down the field. But Barack Obama, with his inside game, got health care reform that can be built on. This is a presidency that has been incredibly progressive and the budgets he's proposed have been progressive; but you wouldn't know that from reading this board. Bill Clinton got NAFTA, he got DADT, he deregulated the banking industry and "reformed" welfare. But yeah, Barack Obama in passing a health reform law, in passing a stimulus package that saved the country and provided seed money for the green economy, in passing financial reform with a consumer bureau. Barack Obama, he's the failure.
Why?
Because he didn't change Washington.
Everyone's always carping about how he's trying to appear bipartisan; but no people are just pissed off because he wasn't the blustering George Bush Democrat (Nevermind he's had more domestic policies enacted than Bush).
Perhaps we should be grateful for what he has delivered, for the crises he's averted. As presidents go, in spite of the systemic problems in Washington, he's done some good. As a manager, he's run a relatively clean government with no major scandals. He's kept the country safe from foreign invasion or attack. He's gotten up every day, done the job. In his speech this year, he noted many of these accomplishments. All of them were politely applauded. I don't think a single person in the room, including myself, would deny him his due on the good he's done given the circumstances.
Barack Obama knows how to give a speech when he's looking to move you; we saw it in Tuscon and during the campaign. He's also made a conscious decision to govern in prose and he began during his inaugural. The speeches of the campaign; that was unsustainable in a governing environment. I have no doubt they'll return in '12.
But somehow, there is sense that this whole thing was supposed to be...bigger. He was the one who said changes he was seeking were akin to the American Revolution, women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement. He was the one who likened his ascent to a fundamental, realigning, meaningful, transformative event. Instead, he has been mainly tinkering with the establishment, except when the establishment fights back hard and demands no tinkering. We have had nothing akin to any of the major historical events listed above. We instead have a sort of work-a-day, normal, caretaker president. Doing the job, managing the status quo. There is no capital letter movement in this administration.
When Canada got single payer health care it started in one province and then spread across the nation. We have enacted a reform that provides health care to the majority of the country and we can build from these exchanges and move forward from there; these health exchanges IMO are incredible. The fact consumers have a regulatory agency devoted to them as a result of the financial reform bill is amazing and since the funding for this can't be taken away by Congress; it provides real teeth and protection for American citizens. Those are two things off the top of my head that are transformative. IMO, the enforcement of regulations by the executive after eight years of hands off the tiller is an amazing transformation that is being felt in a myriad of ways in this country.
I don't know how to express my intense frustration with the defeatism I see in this community and frankly the laziness and instant need for gratification. This country is not a center left or a center right country; it's a majority of people who don't give a fuck about policy and go out and work and live and love and when they come up against something want it fixed. As such, the major success the right has had is in mythologizing their ethos and the propaganda of the right which goes all the way back before Obama and Regan and to the Eisenhower days. But somehow, Barack Obama is supposed to fix that alone.
This is what I see: a lot of people ready to hold Obama accountable but no one holding Congress accountable or themselves. I don't see people trying to make the case alone; which is what the people in WI are doing too late.
What is happening in WI is the result of a political failure for democrats; and the fact that this state supreme court race WASN'T a priority and wasn't picked with care is a symptom of a larger sickness in the party. People shout grassroots; but who knows their state senator? Who cares about the party being built from the state level, school boards, city councils. Where are the local arguments that we're winning?
Barack Obama IMO went big his first year in office: he passed a stimulus that saved this country and laid the ground work for the first major health reform in this country and he needs to be re-elected to defend it so it's implemented and that implementation will lay the ground work for future MORE PROGRESSIVE reform. Those two things alone are epic and I'm fully confident that historians will consider them epic and that the 111th Congress will be remembered well. For some reason, no one wants to celebrate what good has happened and this incredible meme that this last two years have been Bush's third term persist.
The people of Wisconsin are showing us the way forward. When I saw the president last week, I realized, sadly, that the Wisconsin Way is the only way forward.
This is truer than the diarist realized and for reasons that he doesn't seem to comprehend: The people of WI didn't want Obama coming to their state. They didn't want the President to do anything but support them rhetorically when asked. This was a fight they were fighting and winning on their own and they weren't looking for cues from the outside. They took ownership of their states mistake in hiring Walker and looked to make lemonade from the bitter fruit they bought (elections have consequences). The Netroots can take a lesson; a good first step would be in recognizing hitting your quarterback and regretting him in anyway is like pouring blood in shark infested waters. We have seen what happens when Blue Dogs are replaced with Republicans; let's not have Republicans take back all three branches as we crow over our purity.
Good things don't come easy; they take time and care and they last longer that way. Progress in this country happens in fits and starts. Over the last ten years we've done such damage to this country that frankly, I don't blame the President for focusing on fixing the problems rather than messaging. I don't blame him for playing the inside game rather than trying to change the game; it's the game or the country. He put the country first and played the game everyone's playing. Bill Clinton, now HE had the time and space and the OPPORTUNITY to change the game in a time of peace and prosperity when the nation was looking inward. But he didn't, another consequence we're living with right now.
If we want to change this game; we have to do it door to door and issue by issue focusing not simply on the bad in our party but keeping a laser like focus on the other party and PROMOTING more progressives when possible in primaries.
It's about more and better democrats; the two need to go hand in hand. More democrats, always. Better democrats come through primaries.