As Politico noted, during a 60 Minutes segment the Liar-in-Chief again got peevish with those who put him in office and who have had the audacity to be upset with his failure to deliver on his campaign promises. The piece also notes that two years out from the 2012 presidential contest, Obama has managed to piss off huge segments of the Democrat base. Meanwhile, Newsweek has an article that alleges that the progressive Netroots went AWOL during the recently passed midterms. In my view, the one who went AWOL has been Obama. The Netroots still supports the same agenda for change. Unfortunately, Obama seems to have jettisoned that agenda and in the process thrown most of the Netroots under the bus along with an agenda for meaningful change. First this from the Politico article:*
Now comes the hard part, according to Democrats around the country: reckoning with the simple fact that he’s isolated himself from virtually every group that matters in American politics. Congressional Democrats consider him distant and blame him for their historic defeat on Tuesday. Democratic state party leaders scoff at what they see as an inattentive and hapless political operation. Democratic lobbyists feel maligned by his holier-than-thou take on their profession.
*
[M]any Democrats privately say they are skeptical that Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed — in his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job.
*
[S]aid a Democratic official who deals frequently with the White House. “He’s more of a movement leader than a politician. He needs someone to kick his ass on things large and small and teach him to be a politician.”
*
Now to the issue of the Netroots. Newsweek in some ways tries to make it sound like Obama was left abandoned by progressive bloggers and media types, ignoring the long list of broken promises that litter the last two years. It's Obama's betrayal of what he claimed to stand for that accounts for the reaction from the Netroots. I - like I suspect many, many others - no longer support the Liar-in-Chief and it traces to Obama's action (or inaction) rather than any change in me. Here are some highlights from the Newsweek piece:
*
What happened to the Netroots? That’s what I’ve been wondering ever since the Republicans routed the Democrats last week. Two years ago, a lot of people—myself included—really believed that all those online activists who helped elect Barack Obama were going to stick around and support him as he pushed through a sweeping list of progressive measures.
*
In just two years, the pro-Obama Netroots movement has collapsed faster than the dotcom bubble. Look at traffic to the Web site Obama’s team created in the run-up to the 2008 election, BarackObama.com. In October 2008 the site drew 8.5 million unique visitors in the United States. But by this past September, traffic had plummeted to just 664,000, according to ComScore, an Internet researcher.
*
Don Tapscott, an Internet pundit and author of a new book, Macro-wikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, says that Obama “changed the way you get elected, but he didn’t change the way you govern. In the process he lost the support of the young people who powered him into office.” Research done by the Harvard Institute of Politics shows millennial voters (people ages 18 to 29) have become severely turned off over the past year. “They feel disconnected from the movement they helped create,” writes John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics and managing partner of SocialSphere, a strategy group that focuses on social media.
*
Maybe the problem is that Obama failed to deliver some things online activists were hoping for. When we wrote our article two years ago, we mentioned a Web site called Change.org, where people could vote on what they wanted Obama to do; the top-rated idea at the time was “Close Guantánamo prison camp.” That hasn’t happened. Obama also hasn’t repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” or legalized marijuana, or supported gay marriage, or used the Internet to create a more transparent government—issues the Netroots cared about. And he’s escalated the war in Afghanistan.
1 comment:
Add immigration reform, though at least here in California, we had Meg Whitman for Latinos who may have forgotten about Pete Wilson. A primary challenge needs to be mounted, or perhaps Obama could seek the Republican nomination, since he prefers to try to work with Republicans?
On the other hand, no one questions that Lyndon Johnson was a formidable politician, but he also escalated an unpopular war and was isolated in a White House bubble. (W has spent his whole life in a buble of privilege, so we can't say he disappeared into a White House one... And Bill Clinton's wheeling and dealing is what prompted me to vote for Obama in the 2008 presidential primary.)
Post a Comment