Michael Tomasky's article, Against Despair: How our misreading of history harms progressivism today adopts the pose of an historically informed adult reprimanding childish activists for their petulance. But it's really nothing more than one long distraction from the actual facts at hand. FDR and LBJ weren't perfect paragons, we're reminded, and Rome wasn't built in a day.
What this misses is the real crux of the problem: Obama's crippling ideological and imaginative limitations as a child of Reagan--something that simply has no parallel in FDR and LBJ, for all their shortcomings. Like other attempts to portray FDR as a centrist Democrat, no different than Obama, this is simply historically false. If FDR was not always a good Keynesian, for example, it was because Keynesianism was just being invented and no one in America really understood it yet. When Obama's not a good Keynesian, it's because he's unwilling or afraid to simply and repeatedly state facts and push back against lies.
Of course it's quite true that Roosevelt was not as progressive as many of his contemporaries, starting with his wife. And it's true that he backed some conservative ideas as well--though the most significant examples were budget-related ones that largely reflected the primitive state of economic knowledge at the time. But it's also true that he had a much more ideologically diverse group of advisers than Obama, including staunch progressives like Frances Perkins who have no equal in Obama's inner circle.
FDR also had a history of reformist activism from his earliest days in the New York Senate, when he lead a group of insurgents who refused to support the Tammany Hall candidate for US Senate. Although he later mended fences with Tammany somewhat, there was a clear pragmatic purpose for that--getting elected Governor of New York--and the underlying animus never really went away. Tammany Hall supported Al Smith for the Democratic nomination for President in 1932, after which the New Deal effectively crippled Tammany Hall, and though it managed a resurgence under Carmine De Sapio in the early 1950s, his torpedoing of FDR Jr.'s run for NY Attorney General lead to Eleanor Roosevelt's involvement in organizing the New York Committee for Democratic Voters, which eventually drove De Sapio from power.
If you want to understand why there's such a risk-averse culture in progressive politics, look at the response to the Moveon ad by the progressive pundits that permeate DC culture. Here's Michael Tomasky, former proprietor of the American Prospect, excusing Democrats for not doing anything to end the war and attacking Moveon.
And in Congress? There just aren't the votes. And the forces trying to maximize the number of legislators willing to vote to cut off funding shot themselves in the foot Monday with a full-page ad in the New York Times referring to General Petraeus as "General Betray Us". MoveOn.org, which placed the ill-considered and distasteful ad, probably only ensured that a number of Democrats from swing districts who've been on the fence and maybe leaning toward going anti-war will be less likely to tie themselves to any effort led by MoveOn.
Leaving aside Tomasky's battered spouse enabling of Democrats in Congress for doing nothing to end the war despite the 2006 mandate, and his refusal to acknowledge important objectives achieved by Moveon, like today's Republican Jim Walsh's call for defunding the war, what is up with his aristocratic language? 'Ill-considered'? 'Distasteful'? Well I never! Did he get the vapors? Does he always rely on the kindness of strangers?
Below is another tut-tut message from a liberal wonk, an email by Rachel Kleinfeld of the Truman Project that actually encourages progressive veterans to write to military journals and denounce Moveon (thank God wonks can't organize).
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