Obama Remarks to Progressive Are Condescending

As regular readers know, back in 2008 Barack Obama convinced me that he was the real deal and that he offered the hope for real change in how Washington does business and for having an LGBT ally in the White House. I - and many others - have now learned, in my opinion, that it was all a cynical lie and that even where promised legislation has been moved forward, it has been a pitiful measure compared to all the campaign rhetoric. And on the LGBT front, basically nothing has been delivered as promised. Now, the Obama administration is having the gall to lecture former supporters who are none too pleased with all the broken promises as if they were naughty children. I'm beyond pissed off by this and now I seriously hope that Obama will face a primary challenge in the lead up to 2012. And I'm not the only one feeling this way. Obama and his worthless advisers at the White House have created their own problem and are now fanning the flames. Here are highlights from MSNBC:

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President Barack Obama’s lecture to his supporters to snap out of their lethargy is getting a frosty reception from some on the left side of the Democratic coalition.

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“I think it is a remarkably condescending message,” said Darcy Burner, the executive director of ProgressCongress.org and the Progressive Congress Action Fund. Progressives, she said, continue to be deeply involved in policy and in politics and are not at all lethargic or disengaged. “The fact that they [progressives and LGBT activists] are frustrated and discouraged has as much to do with the rhetoric coming out of the White House as anything else,” she said. “And this is the latest example of that.”

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“Here we have a president who over and over again said that a public option was going to be a key part of the health care plan — who then, it turns out, cut a deal to get rid of the public option. And he’s upset at the base that worked so hard to try to get a meaningful health care
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The concern about turnout isn’t that actively engaged political types won’t vote; the concern is that all of the people who got excited by the promise of change in the 2008 election, who voted for the first time or who’d voted rarely, aren’t going to show up because they feel let down.”

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“His contention — that the problem is that the people who believed in him are whiners — is not productive,” she said. “If he wants folks to be excited, he should do something to get them excited — or he should at least stop kicking them while they’re down.”

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Progressive blogger Jane Hamsher was harsher in her criticism of Obama. “This isn’t about GOTV,” she wrote on her blog. “It’s about setting up a narrative for who will take the blame for a disastrous election. And once again, the White House doesn’t care if they make matters worse in order to deflect responsibility from Obama….” She said Obama was engaged in “setting up a fall guy for November. The headline should really read: Obama Distances Himself From Democratic Voters.”

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No matter how hard he tries to deflect blame, in many ways the election on November 2, 2010 is a referendum on Obama and unless something drastic happens, the verdict is going to be quite damning. And if Obama wants to see who is at fault, then he need only look in the mirror.