Hope 2.0: Standing With Obama Over the Long Haul
When Bush was inaugurated in 2000, conservatives championed him. Our man is in the White House, they gloated, and right-wing commentators would snap at the feet of his detractors like guard dogs. This loyalty did not taper off until after it was generally accepted that Bush had made a mess of Iraq, the economy, and our civil liberties.
Even in July 2007 when Bush's approval rating had dropped to an all-time low of 29 percent, Bill Kristol opened a Washington Post op-ed with, "I suppose I'll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one."
Compare this to Kevin Baker's erudite critique of Obama's economic plan in last month's Harper's. Entitled Barack Hoover Obama: The Best and the Brightest Blow It Again, it concludes that Obama is "bound to fail. " And, as if to underscore Harper's fashionable cynicism, the cover shows a digitally disfigured Obama sporting Hoover-like jowls.
It's not that I object to critical thinking. We need it. We don't want to follow in the footsteps of Bush's flag-waving lemmings and walk with Obama over the cliff of an ill-conceived "change." Yet, while we're reminding Obama of his promises and scrutinizing him on his decisions, we need to stand with him.
The fact is, Obama had barely been sworn in before certain leftist bloggers and commentators began to bash him. It's as if they expected Obama to ram through a far left agenda in the same way that Bush rammed through a far right one.
Did progressives like it when he did that? No, it infuriated us. The backlash was one of the reasons why record numbers turned out to vote for Obama. But now it was our turn -- or so some thought.
Apparently they were not listening when Obama vowed to unify the country. Apparently some of them expected him to lie like Bush when he promised to work in a bipartisan way. And some must have thought it was just rhetoric when he spoke of "the audacity of hope."
The sad truth is that many of us are not hopeful. Despite our temporary elation when Obama became President, we haven't been able to shake our chronic pessimism and cynicism.
Whereas our analogues on the right used to effuse over how W. was doing a helluva job even as the country went to hell, we mutter or post disparaging comments about how Obama has let us down. Though he's accomplished some great things in his first seven months, none of it meets our unrealistically high expectations. What we don't get is that, under the circumstances, there's not much difference between being hypercritical and hypocritical.
I mean, could any of us do better? For decades, Massachusetts liberals worked for statewide universal health care and only recently succeeded to a limited degree. And yet some of us expect Obama to score a public health care system for the entire country without making any significant compromises.
Sure, it's hard to watch Obama's ideas get diluted and convoluted. Even his cabinet choices ticked off many lefty activists. But Obama is a radical centrist, not a radical. He needs us to push the perceived middle to the left. Above all, he needs to hear our voices above the relentless well-oiled hum of the corporatists who infest and hover around both parties.
This is just the beginning of a journey that's going to last four and possibly eight years. But if the outcomes progressives want are going to fully materialize, we will have to work harder than ever -- so hard that we'll later realize that our efforts to get Obama elected were merely a warm up. And we're going to have to pull together. As political filmmaker Eugene Jarecki warns, "Don't you dare go MIA during the Obama presidency."
Back in 2006, Obama wrote that what our country needs are citizens "reengaged in the project of national renewal." In his 2008 Democratic Convention speech, he said, "This election has never been about me. It's been about you." And currently emblazoned on his citizen activism website is the following quote: "I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
So why can't we own this presidency? Obama is not responsible for the corruption and gridlock in our political system. These hindrances to real change are tying his hands as much as they are tying ours. Together we can begin to liberate ourselves. But not if we decide that Obama, too, is part of the problem.
Liberal boomers grew up defining themselves in opposition to things: Nixon, the Vietnam War, unequal treatment of women and blacks. While our conservative counterparts were playing team sports and learning to function in a well-defined hierarchy, we were listening to Bob Dylan and learning to question and mistrust authority.
Both perspectives have their strengths, but liberal boomers need now to cultivate the kind of flexibility that Obama demonstrates: an ability to transcend liberal and conservative thinking and pursue a new path based on what works.
During the lead up to the election, liberals could stay in their ideological comfort zone as they worked to get out the vote. To succeed now, we will have to step outside our bubble, back away from some of our entrenched positions, and shelve some of our dogmas. We will have to learn to communicate with people with whom we vehemently disagree in order to get things done -- increment by hard-fought increment -- for the common good.
It's not going to be easy; in fact, it's already gotten downright ugly. But, as Obama pointed out last week, it was no less ugly when Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to establish Social Security, or when John F. Kennedy, and later, Lyndon Johnson, tried to establish Medicare.
Earlier this month in Grand Junction, Obama reiterated that change comes from the bottom up, not the top down, and closed by saying, "If you want a different future -- a brighter future -- I need your help." Will we help him seize that brighter future for us, or roll our eyes and turn smugly away?
Follow Mark Klempner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markklempner
Loading comments…
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
Amen to this i am sick of friendly fire
Maybe this post can be the start of some clear thinking and a reality check. Rome was not built in a day and neither will change. We are part of the change and we must stand firm in support of this President! Remember...it's always darkest before the dawn....
Thanks for this post. I agree completely. We've got a great President with a huge mess on his hands. People started complaining even before he was inaugurated. Ridiculous. Huffpo used to be my first stop on-line. Lately I've been looking around for more Obama- and Dem-positive sites.
I guess Huffpo is going the way of Drudge. Soon we'll probably learn the site has been purchased by Rupert Murdoch.
A leader says, follow me. Single Payer is utilized by every other country in the world. It just works. So, why would Obama and Pelosi take it off the table? Nope. Obama leads, we support. This is his challenge. He needs to keep his campaign promises.
Great post, Mr. Klempner. You got it near perfectly. Thanks.
I don't even read most of the posts anymore on HuffPo because of the rampant negativity and cynicism. Yes, our problems in this country are great but I've never seen negativity and cynicism solve a d.a.m.n. thing.
Hope, resolve, constructive analysis, and elbow grease are the only things that solve problems.
Lee, I was about to post my own comment, but what you wrote beat me to it. Kudos!
Excellent ariticle. You hit it out the park.
Thanks for this article. I search out ones like yours now (notice how positive ones never make it to the main page anymore). With all of the constant attacks and negativity being directed at our president during his first year in office by so-called progressives (they apparently don't know or care how progress actually happens in this country), I look for articles such as yours to reinforce the positive, dont-quit attitude I choose to have.
Brilliant piece. Here is what the author left out. The reason we are having such a hard time fighting with the conservative dems is that the core group in our own party, the progressive/liberals went nuts in feb and started whining about how betrayed they were. So what did all that crying do, it moved the poll numbers on Obama from a robust 62 to a slipping 57. 5 points. That is all the whining did but there are consequences for every single point. 5 points lost us Lieberman, Nelson, Baccus, Conrad, Mary Landrieu, Lincoln and Evan Bayh. It cost us the votes needed to ram through anything let alone health care.
When Obama shoveled trillions at the financial sector with even more enthusiam than Bush evinced, he displayed a capacity for meaningful, though ruinous, action. On the other hand, when he promised relief for folks having difficulties paying their mortgages, he was just fooling around, as the jerry-rigged program he almost has put into place has saved nearly nobody's home from foreclosure. Now, having cut a deal with Billy Tauzin which does an end run around the legislative process, when he assures the insurance companies of a windfall, he has betrayed the hopes of the most vulnerable in our society, and now it looks very likely that he will sign a health care reform bill that mandates acquisition of private insurance without capping costs on health care or rates.
We are now up to our necks in the failure of our democracy, where money is speech, and everybody without it has no voice. Corporatism has become the de facto form of actual governance here, where as another commenter said, it's socialism for the rich and cold hard capitalism for everybody else. And Obama is the spokesmodel of corporatism, left like his predecessor to trumpet stock market gains as proof the economy has turned around, while the millions wander dazedly around the ruins of Main Street, with oodles of free time to do it, in a "jobless recovery."
I'll stand with Obama when he stands with me.
You miss the point. The economy of not just this country but the entire western world was on the edge of calamity. If he had hesitated, if he had done what you seem to have wanted him to do not only would we have a DOW around 2000 right now rather than 9000, but the unemployment rate would about are 15 %. You think people aren't hiring now? You think credit is tight now? What about if the only "banks" left are CreditSuise First Boston and Goldman Sachs? How are things then. Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Wachovia all gone in the same week. We would have been in the Great Depression on steroids. I trust Obama, I voted for him because in a representative democracy instead of MOB rule you have to elect people whom you trust not just to vote your way in congress but to govern your country. I picked Obama, you should have picked McCain, his limited understanding of the economic realities of this country would have had him hesitating trying to decide what to do and you pension and your parents would have vanished. On March 1st or April 1st every retiree in the country would have been waiting for their Pension check and it wouldn't have come. You can't pay out a pension if the money is all gone down the rabbit hole. Support the president.
Perhaps you have it wrong. The reason the world is in a recession is that the worlds biggest consumer, US, is so deeply in debt we can no longer support the rest of the world economies that supply us with our wants. The banks mentioned above have facilitated that debt, to the point of causing themselves pain. Those banks that threw fiscal responsibility tot the wind deserved to fail.
Not all of them would have. And other banks, including small local banks, would have picked up the slack. Had that happened, the basic model now in extant regarding how banking is done would have shifted in a fundamental way, away from multi-nationals to a much more locally controlled system, which in turn would probably prevent the abuses that have taken place in the current banking system.
The fact that the banks received corporate welfare payments means that the system that failed remains essentially intact, with the banking foxes still controlling the regulatory hen house.
The Obama Administration is operating, and gambling on, economic theory and ignoring the basic facts as to why we are in the shape we are in. Knee-jerk support isn't going to help anybody.
Then again, I didn't vote for him, so I feel no reason to defend him.
Thanks for your post - well said. One major problem that Obama is dealing with is that even though it seems as though many people are involved in the health care debate there are still many people who are uninformed and too apathetic to become truly informed. Many young people I know are just not engaged in the current debates. I recently heard one of my younger family members make a comment that I'm almost too embarrassed to share -- about how the US is becoming a Socialist country. And her "brilliant" boyfriend thinks that Obama is spending too much in travel!!! It's sad when college educated people don't really know what's going on and formulate these totally distorted and ignorant opinions. Leftists should be finding a way to reach and educate apathetic and ignorant Americans rather than trashing Obama -- if there were an overwhelming majority of citizens who truly understood the health care situation we would get reform without all the hysteria.
Excellent Post and I agree with your take on people forgetting what we voted for...More and more I am hearing people 'give up' and are speaking of 'regret' or 'i'll vote republican if he doesn't do what I want..exactly'...interesting to me as I repeatedly see/hear the true colors of the republican party of today. They are promoting hate and evil and violence imho at every turn they can and sometimes succeeding. .I personally never was so naive to expect President Obama to be perfect and be able to accomplish every single campaign promise..none have ever..and with the crap that people are flaunting daily...huh.
The funny thing to me is that everyone knows that change is hard....
yet they forget that while their complaining about it....it's usually already happened...
YESWEARE
The President has said we need health care reform that is "uniquely American". We don't need a benevolent dictator like FDR was; but, we DO need a President that will LEAD, not follow, Congress, like JFK or RWR. After campaigning against it, Obama has sold us out to the special-interest groups. Americans are clamoring for a voice in the final bill - and feel co-opted by the special interest lobbying groups that the President has been secretly making deals with (Big Insurers, Big Pharma, etc.) who are the Primary Beneficiaries of the proposed legislation. PLEASE, do yourself a favor and check out the below links:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story
http://www.redstate.com/bs/2009/08/20/its-pretty-bad-when-you-have-air-america-calling-you-a-liar-mr-president/
DON'T BE FOOLED!!! The Insurance and Pharma lobbyists will be the Big Winners if the current health care reform legislation is passed - with the added detriment that Democrats will lose their hard-won majorities in Congress if they pass this lobbyist dream legislation.
MUCH SMARTER ALTERNATIVE: SOLVE THE DIRECT PROBLEM DIRECTLY (provide a $5,000 annual health care voucher for the truly indigent uninsured, and mandate coverage for pre-existing conditions under all existing plans - DON'T GIVE MORE UNDESERVED BUSINESS AT EXORBITANT PROFITS TO BIG INSURANCE AND BIG PHARMA, TO COVER THE YOUNG, HEALTHY AND WEALTHY PEOPLE WHO DON'T NEED IT OR WANT IT!!
ORGANIZE IN YOUR OWN STATE TO MAKE YOUR (SENATOR/REP) SUPPORT SINGLE PAYER!
BO DOESN'T MAKE THE LAWS, CONGRESS PEOPLE CONGRESS!
"It's as if they expected Obama to ram through a far left agenda in the same way that Bush rammed through a far right one."
As If? they do and they are wrong, wrong, wrong.
I don't think expecting Obama to do what he promised is out of line. That he doesn't explain why he won't, simply makes it worse.
Progressives are patient. We've waited decades, and found a candidate that said things with which we agreed. . To expect us to be patient forever, no matter who is in the White House, ... and excuse away our President's deviations from his campaign promises, ... is to ask us to play stupid a while longer.
"Radical Centrist"? I've never read such a ridiculous pairing of thoughts in my life!
What deviations might you be referring to?
I am a progressive. I voted for Obama. I have 3 issues I care about alot. Real health care reform. Repeal of DOMA. Repeal of DADT.
My optimism was shattered when Obama invited that righty evangelical gay-hater/baiter Rick Warren to be in the inauguration. How could any of his LGBT supporters who worked so hard, spent so much, voted so unanimously for him possibly enjoy their moment of celebration with Rick up on that stage? What an incredible slap in the face, to millions of his biggest supporters.
If "uniting our country" means insulting and ignoring your supporters, while kissing up to the hate mongers and evangelicals, if it means gutting every piece of legislation until it looks like something Bush would have signed, then what is the purpose of electing democrats? If it means supporting those who wish to strip the human rights of some citizens, and throwing the disadvantaged who elected you under the bus, then what is the purpose?
Of the 3 things I wanted, none have been done yet. But, I did read that Rick was up on that stage. However, I did not bother to watch the inauguration. It would have been too disgusting.
This is how the conservative neocons win. Our government was specifically designed to work on compromise.
I don't think our government would have malfunctioned if someone other than Warren spoke at the inauguration.
And the fact that the LGBT community has been screaming at the president since december has cost the president several pts in the polls. Not enough to effect his re election but just enough to make passing any repeal of DOMA and DADT impossible. You have destroyed your own ability to get what you want. If the president were in the upper 70s in popularity he could do anything he wanted. But he isn't in the upper 70s he is in the middle 50s, mostly because of progressives jumping off the band wagon. I respect your issues, but if you want to pass them grow some political sense. A popular president has juice, and unpopular one doesn't. You don;t have the political muscle to cost him re-election you have just enough political muscle to make sure your agenda is never realized.
J
Thanx J.,
You're not as far right as I thought from ok.
I do get people who are frustrated, but when you abandon someone you voted for because they don't do everything YOU want as soon as you want, and exactly how you want, you end up being one of the people who help to open the door to the next president being another George Bush...or worse.
You must be logged in to comment. Log in or connect with
