Why I don't blame Barack Obama

After disappointments in the extension of the Bush tax cuts, budget deal, and especially the deficit deals, liberal bloggers have started castigating Barack Obama for his incompetence at the bargaining table. Although I agree that the results in these recent deals were disappointing, I don't blame Barack Obama.


I never expected much out of Barack Obama. As someone who believes fundamentally in the progressive nature of the free market and, like most democrats, thinks the government should only protect people from the worst excesses of the free market, he was never going to come along and drastically change the way Wall Street works. He wasn't going to impose heavier taxes on the rich (repealing the Bush tax cuts is just the start, since they really only amount to a few percentage points off the historically low tax rates rich people pay now); he wasn't going to launch a massive works program to make sure everyone had a job; he wasn't going to be a vocal critic of corporate influence in American politics.

At the very best, we can only expect Obama to put off the nation's backslide into the economic abyss. Granted, I thought he would be able to turn things around for maybe 5 years or even a decade and never expected that we'd already be facing a recession now, but then again, who could have predicted the disturbing and wacky events of the past two years. Death panels? Michelle Bachmann? Donald Trump? Birthers? Threatening to not raise the debt-ceiling? One of the reasons the left is still so unorganized is that many of our minds are still trying to figure out what the f*** is going on, which I fully sympathize with. But it's definitely time to stop staring at the freak show on the right and get down to business.

If we had elected McCain, the crisis we're expecting to start on Monday would have come two years ago, when republican leaders were struggling to wrangle enough votes on the bailouts and stimulus to keep us from backsliding into a depression.

In short, the first reason I don't blame Obama is that we, as voters on the left, should know we are electing representatives who are very moderate historically speaking. FDR democrats had a much more progressive vision of the world and were more willing to make drastic changes in the economy. We have let the wild cries of "socialist!" on the right go to our head, such that we go out of our way not to appear as extremists and not to elect extremists. But now we've seen that, no matter how moderately conservative Barack Obama becomes, the right is still going to call him a radical Kenyan Islamic communist.

The second reason I don't blame Obama is that the left is not fired up at all about what is happening. We are entering a new phase of American politics, one in which civic involvement is going to become increasingly important. If the 51-52% of us who sympathize with the left don't want to see our values steamrolled, we are going to have to speak out a LOT more to combat this stereotype that the US is inherently conservative.

Whereas the Tea Party has been turning out to town halls and launching protests, we just sit at home despairing about how inherently conservative the US is. Hogwash! Most polls show a plurality* of Americans sympathize with the democrats. The only reason the right is dominating the debate is that they are louder and more organized. It's high time that we started to respond in kind with the massive protests and civil disobedience that we are known for.

Protesting and engaging in civil disobedience will raise the profile of the progressive side of American politics and drown out a good bit of the "libtard" mentality that currently gets so much coverage in the media. It will also go a long way to making Obama's job easier, because, let's face it, even as the moderate he is, he hasn't been able to do most of the things he wanted since he got elected because of the unprecedented opposition he has received from the right.

You hear that noise? It's me tapping my foot impatiently. Let's get on the move! Let's go stand up for what we believe!

*Edit: changed "majority" to "plurality" in  the third to last paragraph. More on polling, partisan affiliation, and support for democratic priorities to come.