Meta-Criticisms of Barack Obama

The mainstream message (from the Right) about those on the Left who are dissatisfied with the presidency of Barack Obama is that they bought into - to quote Sarah Palin - "the hopey-changey" stuff too wholeheartedly, that they are mere idealists who did not see this communist/fascist/socialist/atheist/muslim era coming and have been blindsided. It's obviously a simple way of sniping at the Left, and it is effective. It makes them seem childish and unversed in actual political issues, which I haven't found to be the case with many critics of Obama.

The dissatisfaction has been with the President's policies, for the most part. The Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys of the world convey the message as if Democrats din't understand what a Barack Obama presidency would entail, that the full knowledge of a "liberal" presidency might have scared them in the first place.

This is where the message has been thoroughly distorted. The problem that surfaces has to do with unfulfilled promises and ineffectual leadership, as Digby best articulates in an article released today:

Therefore, his [Obama's] political advisers should know that when the country is still reeling from unemployment and foreclosures after nearly two years, the passage of an inadequate stimulus bill, which unrealistic benchmarks and a giddy victory party ensured would be the only chance they got, the only people who will consider that a "success" would be beltway insiders. They should have realized that a health care bill that nobody in their right minds would have designed from scratch, the worst aspects of which liberals will be asked to defend for years to come, would be met with dampened enthusiasm by those who watched the process devolve from a sense of progressive purpose to an exhausting farce. They are expected to be able to predict that financial reform without accountability for what's gone before, combined with the administration's unwillingness to confront the civil liberties abuse of the last administration -- indeed expanding on them in some cases -- would show a lack of fundamental concern for justice among those who care about such things.

An extensive quote - sorry - but one necessary to articulate the fundamental flaw in how the country has been run for the last year-and-a-half. Obama has ostensibly carried on many of the policies of his predecessor and has been at least as secretive about, well, everything, so that some backlash should be expected. What the President (and many of his advisors) do not seem to grasp is that the same rules of governance do not apply. Plenty of people argue that George W. Bush enacted several dozen anti-conservative policies while occupying the White House, but he encountered very little resistance from those on his side, because the Right tends to contain cheerleaders and people concerned with a unified vision. Even if he didn't really follow Reagan's modern conservatism, he still had an (R) next to his name, so that was enough.

The same sort of people do not occupy the Democratic Party, and that is perhaps where Obama's most embarrassing shortcoming lies. He expected the entirety of the Obama-voting-populace to support the presidency no matter what. In a country as divided as ours, he expected some measure of loyalty, despite some potentially disappointing decisions. Let me take this opportunity to state that John McCain would have been no better. At this point, he's just a pair of fucking political clown shoes, but I digress. But this is not a time for blind faith in the government. Barack Obama is not a mirror image of President Bush, and maybe that's why he's having so many problems. What the Right refuses to accept and the Left refuses to forgive is that Barack Obama is not a liberal version of Ronald Reagan. He may be viewed as such in twenty or thirty years, but he has given the public no credible evidence that he has transformed politics in any measurable way.