I see a lot of folks blaming the White House for the losing the House and for the tightened majority in the Senate. I'm looking at polls where the votes of Democrats and republicans are pretty much split at 38% each with 'independent' voters making up the rest. Progressives may well make up the bulk of those independents, and the divided vote between the two major parties suggests that progressives who sat out this election could make a difference in the next one.
What I'm not seeing is a sure calculation where policies favored by progressives would have made a difference in the last election if the White House had 'pushed' for them. Critics can certainly claim that progressive voters would have made a winning margin of difference in the last election, but I'm not sure they're accounting for the republican and conservative voters who might trump their votes in opposition to their agenda.
The disconnect between progressive complaints about the President and his policies affecting the outcome of this election, and their own failure to provide winning margins of votes where it mattered is stunning. Leaving aside the fact that the progressive supporters did not manage to produce enough voters to make a winning difference (especially in the conservative states and districts) there's still the matter of the votes which were cast by the opposition; presumably in opposition to those very policies progressives insist the President should have 'fought for' (policies imagined, made-up, or not).
Where is the accounting for politics? We all eschew politics in the abstract, but we are, nonetheless, subject to the most base of political attitudes, views, and reactions from republican voters and others in opposition to our party. All of the talk about 'standing up and fighting' for more progressive initiatives ahead of midterms like we just faced, may well be energizing to the progressives who were inclined to sit out the election or vote for someone other than a Democrat, but it's also a prescription for a conservative backlash at the polls like we just witnessed. Is it realistic to expect that a more progressive agenda would have produced more progressive-minded voters to trump the conservative-led ones? I'm not convinced. Witness the 2004 presidential election where record Democratic turnout was outmatched by a record number of republican votes.
Whether we asked for it or not, many of the results of this midterm election were backlashes against perceived and enacted policies and positions of the White House and Democrats which fell outside of the conservative views of voters who made the winning difference in many races. The fact that progressive critics are also registering their own disagreements with the scope and direction of the President's policies points up the balance of intentions and actions the White House is challenged to manage in the policies they push to enact and the ones they advocate.
It's clear that progressive critics don't view the health care reform legislation that was passed and signed into law as 'progressive' policy, but it certainly was; especially in relation to the status quo. This President fought to see it enacted. He didn't 'fight' for many ideals and initiatives that were advocated by progressive advocates, but there is no denying that many of the health care/health insurance changes he did manage to see enacted were part of someone's progressive agenda. We can argue about the effect and degree of the changes, but the health law was progress.
Likewise, the bailout of auto companies to protect worker's jobs was a progressive achievement by this President. Certainly there were aspects of that initiative which could have been more amenable to progressives, but the action was undeniable progress in saving jobs and providing the landscape for future employment in the strengthened industry.
Most of the criticisms of this President center on the fact that he hasn't fulfilled all of his promises or hasn't done enough to make the ones he found when he came into office go away. There are very valid criticisms of the personnel he's chosen to manage his agenda, but there are some concrete accomplishments which are obscured by the magnitude and the duration of the economic mismanagement of the last administration.
Further, we've yet to see a progressive majority elected by voters which would enact most of the significant planks of a progressive agenda that the President might propose. We could watch him spit in the wind, but I'm fine that he didn't waste his time standing in the way of the incremental changes he achieved in defense of things which are clearly unsupported by the balance of power in our legislature.
It's always convenient to complain about the President's failure in enacting a progressive agenda, but short shrift is given to the reality that he needs partners in Congress to push it forward. That progressive majority hasn't been forthcoming. That's a big deal. Who's responsible for that? I certainly don't think you can put the blame for the inability of progressives to field and advance enough legislators to form a working progressive majority at his feet. It's not as if there was/is majority support among voters for a progressive presidential candidate.
It's not as if there was a plethora of support for a progressive agenda among voters in this midterm. The President can make all of the defiant stands he wants (or progressives want) and he can just as surely suffer the consequences of the votes from those opposing that stance. If we care at all about winning these elections, we have to acknowledge the challenges of balancing the 'enthusiasm' that is sparked by adhering to either point of view.
This president has worked with what the voters gave him. This next round will be a decidedly more defensive one. That's not his doing. That's what voters have dealt him. Where is the evidence that a winning majority of voters are insisting on a progressive agenda? Any fight he wages - and he has waged some with a bit of success - is an uphill fight because of the conservative and republican legislators voters have sent to manage what he proposes. Yes, he has waged some and won some -- albeit with a muted effect that obscures the historic effort he's made in moving Congress to act in response to the financial catastrophe and national emergency -- but he has made some progress.
from a Rolling Stone article posted at the pda:
http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2010-10-31-03-45-02-...___ Less than halfway through his first term, Obama has compiled a remarkable track record. As president, he has rewritten America's social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration's $3 trillion blunder in Iraq. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.
Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare—reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers—saving more than 1 million jobs—and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy—an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy's moonshot and one that's on track to double America's capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama's first term.
On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls "an Obama imprint on the court for generations."
What's even more impressive about Obama's accomplishments, historians say, is the fractious political coalition he had to marshal to victory. "He didn't have the majority that LBJ had," says Goodwin. Indeed, Johnson could count on 68 Democratic senators to pass Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt had the backing of 69 Senate Democrats when he passed Social Security in 1935. At its zenith, Obama's governing coalition in the Senate comprised 57 Democrats, a socialist, a Republican turncoat—and Joe Lieberman . . .
read more:
http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2010-10-31-03-45-02-news.php We're now facing the consequences of the shortage of support from Democratic voters in the midterm election. The President and Democrats should certainly work to accommodate the views of those 'independents' which share our Democratic values, and, they should work to bring progressives closer to support of the administration's efforts. However, the President and our party are not going to be able to please everyone.
In my view, this White House has worked hard to manage support from voters, even as they work to advance their agenda in a legislature which doesn't yet have a working progressive majority to enact the policies supporters and critics say they want to see a 'fight' for. That failure to elect a progressive majority looks to be a state-by-state challenge, more than it's something the President is able to produce or guarantee. Where's the accounting for that failure of progressives to produce support from voters around the country? That failure can't all be laid at the feet of the White House.
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