The Left has failed Obama

Liberal, progressive, or left-wing — pick your category — dissatisfaction with Obama is almost as high as that from the right. Unlike right-wing upset, however, that from the left is not merely in opposition to what he is doing — he has done much for the left to support — but disappointment that he has not done more. The two items at the top of that list are likely the on-going, endless war in Afghanistan and the “failure” to push aggressively for a public option in the health care bill.

At the same time the left is being disappointed and disturbed by policy choices, the White House produces communications that has the same affect. Instead of messages that liberals and progressives want to hear, too much of the administration’s language and actions seems like it could have been developed by conservative think tanks or PR firms. Lefties, not surprisingly, want to hear messages reflecting their own world view. Not hearing such from Obama and his representatives (to be accurate, not hearing enough of it and on certain key topics), they worry that his intentions and sympathies lay farther to the right than they assumed when they supported him for president.

Yet he continues to push liberal/progressive programs and policies forward. Unfortunately, too many other things get in the way and Obama’s real accomplishments go either unnoticed, unreported or overwhelmed by more dramatic events. The Gulf oil spill has fouled up more than water; like the economy and Wall Street meltdown last year, this mess has diverted media attention while blocking his administration from directly pursuing policy and legislative goals he has based his presidency upon. Even if he manages to get some kind of legislation passed, many on the left will consider it “watered-down” from his stated goals, just as they did with the health care bill. Whatever the real accomplishments an energy and climate bill represent, it will be less than what lefties desired, leading to further disappointment on their part.

Obama is attempting a daring balancing act. He was elected to enact policies that can only be called liberal, and he is dedicated to those liberal policies. He wants to undo thirty years of conservative national government. He knows the world has changed and that the United States is way behind the curve on too many critical issues. He’s not going to back down, even if he does compromise on legislation. If he serves two terms, and I believe he will, the country will be radically changed — and the right wing knows it.

This is the crux of Obama’s difficulties. He has to mitigate the hatred and outrage from the right even as he acts in ways that will continue to fuel that hate and anger. Take issues of discrimination against GLBTQ Americans. He has made a number of significant changes via policy to end practices that were unjust, using policy to end a variety of discriminatory practices based on sexual orientation. At the same time, while the Congress appears ready to overturn Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Obama has not given that effort the extra bit of push gay rights advocates believe would get the repeal over the top. Which, of course, exacerbates the problem of perception on the left: that he is not willing to be the progressive many want him to be.

But Obama faces a huge barrier to everything he does, and he faces it because those who mostly loudly demand he be “more progressive” do very little to provide him the base from which to act in that way. What is the most volatile, seemingly powerful group in the country today? In various forms, of course, it’s the Tea Party movement — not MoveOn, not Organizing for America, not the Democrats. When Obama sits down with his advisors to discuss what his next steps are for a particular policy — health care, the economy, national security, energy policy, education, the socialist takeover of all our god-given liberties — his concern for how the left might react is, I am convinced, far less than fear about how the Tea Partiers will respond. And for good reason.

It’s they, and not the left, who have organized and acted to command media attention. It’s they, and not the left, who show up en masse at town halls to demand their points of view being given prominence (not that I want liberals and progressives to act like assholes and spoiled children in public). The Tea Party, not the left, has united to fight for what they believe in. The Tea Party, not the left, has the power to disrupt, if not obliterate, the President’s ability to push the legislation he knows is necessary to rescue the country from so many of its critical problems.

The failure of the left to make itself the dominant power in American politics — and please, let’s stop whining about the media; this is a mess of our own making — puts Obama in a precarious position. He has to take actions that prove to voters he and the Democrats deserve their vote, and he has to avoid setting off a right-wing feeding frenzy with those actions. Since he cannot accomplish this balancing act through tangible actions — he can’t end discrimination against GLBTQ Americans while enacting the homophobic policies that would appease TPers and their ilk — he has to do it symbolically. He needs to take actions that, as Edelman states, reassures conservative Americans that he cares for them as well. His inaction, so to speak, on DADT, sends the message that he is not a true supporter of the “gay agenda”, and yet he is doing nothing to keep the Congress from overturning that law. If Obama made a speech and called directly for an end to DADT now — as opposed to an indefinite future commitment he need never fulfill — all hell would break loose. The efforts of Congress to end DADT would crash to an immediate halt as those who have the ability and the will to impose their political will, conservatives and tea partiers, brought the hammer down.’

I’m not saying Obama’s centrist actions on the economy, for example, hide a socialist agenda being enacted in the shadows of the White House. Obama is a centrist in many ways; in the context of contemporary politics, however, that’s a fairly liberal place to be. He has demonstrated, over and over, his desire to undo much of the recent rightward shift in American national government. But to be successful, and because he cannot count on those who elected him to back up his actions in a productive manner, he is forced to the other option: mitigate opposition. Attempting to engage the right through dialogue, the pointlessness of which I am confident he recognizes, is his primary symbolic action.

The left has no say in these matters because they have failed to get their act together. By sitting around and being pissed-off at Obama’s “failure” to make all their dreams come true in less than two years (“Wah, he’s not even trying”), the left has ceded the political landscape to a small minority that is unified, dedicated and willing to get off their asses and work for their goals. The left has not. And until we get over ourselves and decide that progress will happen over a period of years and not next week, until we decide to be politically smart, we will continue to force the president to make plans that consider what his enemies, and not his friends, care most about.

His enemies are more willing to hurt him than his friends are to help him.