Last night, Barack Obama spoke at a $30,000 per plate DNC fundraising event at the "home of Richard and Ellen Richman, who live in the exclusive Conyers Farm development in Greenwich [Connecticut]'s famed 'back country' neighborhood," and said the following about liberal critics of his presidency:
Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.) We have had the most productive, progressive legislative session in at least a generation.
So, just as Robert Gibbs before him explained (albeit more harshly), if you're one of those people dissatisfied with large parts of the Obama presidency, that's only because you have something wrong with the way you think (you need drug testing/you "congenitally see the glass as half empty"), and because you are saddled with extremely unrealistic, child-like expectations (you're angry that the Pentagon hasn't closed yet/bitter that Obama "hasn't yet brought about world peace: 'I thought that was going to happen quicker' (Laughter.)"). In other words, you're just a petulant, unreasonable, unrealistic, fringe child who doesn't appreciate the greatness and generosity he's given you (h/t Jane Hamsher). Contrary to what many of you thought, it's these flaws within yourself that cause you to be dissatisfied with the administration, not because of any of this:
which he followed with a litany of screen shots and links documenting many of Obama's most eggregious betrayals, after which he wrote:
What's most striking about Obama's comments is that there is no acceptance whatsoever of responsibility (I've failed in some critical areas; we could have/should have done better). There's not even any base-motivating vow to fight to fix these particular failures (we'll keep fighting for a public option/to curb executive power abuses/to reduce lobbyist and corporate control of our political process). Instead, he wants you to know that if you criticize him -- or even question what he's done ("well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that") -- it's your fault: for being some sort of naive, fringe-leftist idiot who thought he would eliminate the Pentagon and bring about world peace in 18 months, and/or because you simply don't sufficiently appreciate everything he's done for you because you're congenitally dissatisfied.
Perhaps what struck me most about this morally despicable performance is how perfectly Obama embodied the conservative caricature of an out-of-touch liberal elitist at the same time that he was heaping scorn on liberals in a dramatically out-of-touch attack on those responsible for his political success. He was, in short, the conservative's liberal: he embodied everything that conservatives can think of to make liberalism distasteful, if not revolting, and nothing that liberals would recognize to make liberalism attractive.
There was a superficial incoherence to Gibbs' hippy-punching, but that only masked a deeper incoherence. The superficial incoherence was (a) essentially dissing the "professional left" as elitist, out-of-touch & politically irrelevant while (b) blaming it for bringing Obama down.
But the deeper incoherence is Obama's own political philosophy, strategy, and ideology. He'd be fine, it could at least be argued, if he was up against Eisenhower-era Republicans like his grandparents and their friends. But no sane person in the world thinks that he is. And since he's not, everything he does is taking place in a sort of an Alice-in-Wonderland world. If he wants to lash out and blame "the professional left" for this, that's fine. But it doesn't tell us anything about anything except him--and how he blameshifts for his own failure on his own terms, the terms of a would-be "transformative reformer" out to battle special interests and return sovereignty to the people--something he obviously has not done.
Indeed, this supreme act of hippy-punching--barely more than two weeks after his supreme make-nice video message to Netroots Nation--seems like nothing so much as a declaration of Obama's own intransigence and unwillingness to face reality. He may be much more sophisticated, in language at least, but he's just as much close-minded to unwanted input as Bush & Cheney were, and Gibbs' hippy-punching was intended to triple underscore that in neon red magic marker, even as he overly denied it.
The very fact that Gibbs is outraged by Bush/Obama comparisons shows how significant they are. A stuck pig squeals. Like Bush before him, Obama would rather fail spectacularly on a global scale than admit his failures so far and take fundamental corrective action.
Of course it's not just progressives that Obama is disappointing, but it's convenient to pretend it is so. However, the unemployment rate, the mortgage foreclosure rate, and the state-and-local government layoff-and-shutdown rate are all far too high for that to be true. And it's not just "the professional left" that's being ignored. It's just about everyone outside of K-Street, including veterans.
It's certainly not fair to criticize Obama for not being a Lefty. He wasn't ever a Lefty. He didn't promise to be a Lefty. And there's no reason to expect that he would ever become a Lefty.
But Lefties (like me) who criticize Obama are not criticizing him for failing our Lefty test. Our criticism is that Obama is failing the Obama test: that he is not delivering the presidency that he promised.
When Candidate Obama took on Hilary Clinton, he was quite clear about what he thought about the way Washington works. And he was quite clear about why he was running for President. As he said:
[U]nless we're willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change. And the reason I'm running for president is to challenge that system.
Read it again: "The reason I am running for president is to challenge that system."
....
Obama's strategy as president has not been to "change the way Washington works." Rather, he has pushed reforms in the same old way, with the same old games.
Lessig does a masterful job of pounding this simple point home. But I'd be deeply remiss not to further connect Lessig's point with one made by Chris as culminating point of his post-2004 elction analysis ("Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition"): The key to building an enduring progressive coalition is to unite self-identified liberals with self-identified reformers, whose primary concerns lie with opening up government and making it more accountable. And this is Obama's greatest failure: a failure to deliver on the actual substance of non-partisan openness and good government.
