When Barack Obama took the oath of office as America’s president in January of 2009, liberals were just sure he was one of their own. All that campaign talk about bipartisanship and post-partisanship and working from the center was just that, campaign talk. After all, the Republicans had tagged him as the Senate’s most liberal member, hadn’t they? Yes, one of theirs, a fellow traveler on the liberal path, had ascended to the pinnacle of power. And, a few executive orders later, they were convinced that the dream was real.
When he didn’t go all FDR on the stimulus package, but agreed to downsize and indicated a willingness to sign off on allowing a third of what was left to be Republican-sounding tax cuts, they didn’t flinch. He had gotten it done, and picked up a couple of Republican votes in the process. What a sneaky, brilliant progressive he was.
When credit card reform came to the bargaining table and Obama met with industry leaders, the left didn’t abandon him. Surely he would co-opt the financial wizards with his charisma and they would fall into line. And when he agreed that the final bill could include a nine month lag before implementation to allow the credit card companies to “prepare”, there was no progressive outrage that the delay would give them time to raise base interest rates and devise new ways to assess fees on consumers through loopholes in the law.
He nominated a mainstream, barely left of center, Federal Appeals Court Judge to fill a newly vacant slot on the Supreme Court. Liberals let themselves focus on her “personal story”, and diversity. Lack of commitment to a blatantly progressive judicial philosophy seemed somehow less important.
When health care reform took center stage and the president took single-payer off the table before negotiations began, a few started to raise their eyebrows, but not many. It was a good faith move before meeting with Republican legislators, that’s all. And there was sure to be a public option that, over time, would lead to single-payer. But there were dozens of Republican amendments, the public option fell by the wayside and the bill took on the flavor of the Republican alternative to the Clinton health care proposal of the early 90’s. Progressives swallowed hard, allowed that it was health care reform of a sort, and they’d support it. But enthusiasm was starting to wane.
Guantanamo hadn’t been closed immediately, or even by the end of the first year, as promised. Card Check, along with Cap and Trade, were bogged down, and the president wasn’t pressing Congress to get them done. Climate change legislation was nowhere to be seen. There was a troop surge in Afghanistan, and there were no visible signs of removing great numbers of troops from Iraq. Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a first year agenda item promised to his LGBT supporters, had turned into a year-long DoD study, putting off final action into 2011. Immigration reform was being talked, but slow-walked.
The promised “green economy” was giving way to a White House that talked openly about building nuclear plants and expanding offshore drilling. The banks, despite attempts at presidential persuasion, weren’t following through on the mortgage modification program. Wall Street was making a comeback, but Main Street remained mired in recession and unemployment, and progressives began to notice that the Obama economic team seemed to vet their experience through the very same Wall Street banks and brokerage houses that had profited and so generously bonused their executives from public largess. And the left began to remember that “their” president had received more campaign contributions from Wall Street than any candidate in history.
All the while the Republicans held tough, ever purging their ranks rightward and decrying every act, no matter how watered down or compromised, to be socialist and leftist and irresponsible. They were not to be won over no matter what the president conceded before or after negotiations began. They successfully painted him as radical even as they pandered more and more to their own radical elements. Obama’s attempts to persuade through pre-negotiation compromise began to look more and more to his liberal supporters like appeasement through concession. And the party profiting from his appeasement continued to vote against him and cry “socialist.”
In the morass of health care reform, independents began to drift. This president who insisted on soft peddling partisanship was losing them. Unwilling to call out Republicans in the harshest terms, as they did to him, cost him the war of public perception. People, who weren’t sure what socialism was, knew it was bad and wondered whether they should continue to believe in a man who so many of his opponents said was a socialist. And if he wasn’t a socialist why didn’t he go after those who said he was? This wasn’t Harry Truman. This wasn’t FDR. This wasn’t the change they believed in when last they voted.
Off year elections came, and Republicans basked in victory. They had held together, energized by opposition to the “socialist” president. The independents had drifted. Disheartened and disillusioned progressives stayed home in droves. And the president still looked for compromise, and Republican votes, on a watered down financial reform package, spoke lukewarm about immigration reform and put forward a second Supreme Court nominee, one that Republicans would find a way to oppose, that independents didn’t know what to think of, and who seemed to lack the proper credentials in the eyes of the once enthusiastic progressive base.
Calm, reasoned intelligence, once thought to be Obama’s greatest strength, has proven to be his greatest weakness. Unable to understand that he could never have won over the Republicans, he continues in vain to try. Unable to understand that post-partisanship was never possible, he finds himself unwilling to engage in a sustained partisan attack. Unable to believe that his liberal base would grow disillusioned, he has betrayed them in ways both subtle and overt. They too are turning away now, and signs of anger are beginning to appear on his left flank. In his attempt to be all things to all people, he has instead exposed himself on all sides.
[Author’s Note: the photo above depicts a military formation of horse drawn cannon exposed on both the right and left flank.]
Cross Posted at Elijah’s Sweete Spot.
Contributor, aka tidbits. Retired attorney in complex litigation, death penalty defense and constitutional law. Former Nat’l Board Chair: Alzheimer’s Association. Served on multiple political campaigns, including two for U.S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield (R-OR). Contributing author to three legal books and multiple legal publications.