An op-ed column by Maureen Dowd in Sunday's New York Times stirred up many of the same arguments and caused me to revisit my thinking.
On the one hand, Obama swept into office with a huge electoral victory and commanding majorities in both the Senate and House. If the country really was saying it was ready for change, shouldn't he have delivered swiftly and decisively on health care and financial services reform, not to mention climate-change legislation and comprehensive immigration reform? Shouldn't he have pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan?
On the other hand, we probably expected too much, too soon given the euphoria of election night, the giddiness that came with his inauguration and, not least, the knowledge that campaigning is way different from governing. You say what you must to shore up your base; you move toward the middle -- away from extremes on both ends -- if you want to successfully practice politics.
Into this fray steps Dowd. In a column aptly titled "No Love From The Lefties" she calls on Obama to dump Robert Gibbs as press secretary and make him what he yearns to be: an inside counselor to the president, a position that relieves him of sparring with the press, often to his boss' detriment. I don't have an opinion on Dowd's suggestion or Gibbs himself, but I do have to say she absolutely nailed it when she analyzed the Democrats' current state of dysfunction. They were united by their hatred of George W. Bush, but Obama's election has revealed they are splintered according to how far left they lean. Liberal? Radical? Progressive?
Whatever they call themselves, they're disappointed to find Obama is on their right, trying to find traction in the political center. And, Dowd notes, the situation isn't helped any by the president himself.
President Obama is testing how elastic he can be, how much realism he can have before he betrays his idealism. For better and worse, he is an elitist and a situationist. But the professional left — like the professional right — often considers pragmatism a moral compromise.
The lefties came to the defense of the centrist Clinton during impeachment. Now that Obama is under attack, however, they are not coming to his defense, even though he has given more to the liberal cause than the scandal-stunted Clinton ultimately achieved.
He has shepherded the biggest expansion of social programs since the Great Society and spearheaded the biggest spending program with the stimulus. But for the left (and for some economists), it was not as big as it ought to have been.
Obama got elected because of the clarity of his campaign and his speeches. But, surprisingly, he’s in some ways an incoherent president. He’s with the banks, he’s against the banks. He’s leaving Afghanistan, he’s staying in Afghanistan. He strains at being a populist, but his head is in the clouds.
There's a lot of truth in Dowd's analysis. Obama has been wounded politically by some of his own backers who expected home runs and got singles and doubles instead. At the same time, count me among those who wish Obama could reclaim some of his campaign magic and put it to good use in talking honestly -- and passionately -- to the American people.
Photo by Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times
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