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Under Pres. Obama, the Left feels left out
The outrage among some of America’s most vocal liberals at President Barack Obama’s failure to expand government-run health care caps a year of disappointments for Obama’s allies on the left and raises worrying questions for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.
The revolt led by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean comes after a series of more contained disappointments among traditional Democratic constituencies that invested heavily in Obama — unions, gays, civil libertarians, Hispanics, and anti-war Democrats, among others — who have seen specific promises deferred and grand hopes of systematic change denied by an administration that has found itself severely limited by a combination of economic realities, congressional imperatives, and tactical choices.
The disillusion has produced a growing tide of organizing energy — and money — among liberals aimed at dragging the White House back to where many supporters believe Obama's heart really lies. Union presidents have discarded their talking points and are openly sparring with the White House, while gay rights activists threaten civil disobedience, the ACLU keeps litigating, and congressional Hispanic leaders work to force their issues into the debate.
But while those actions may actually create politically useful space to the president’s left, the other consequence of disillusion is what polls have found to be deepening apathy among Democratic voters.
“This has been a fairly transactional presidency, and the president did nothing to insulate himself from the compromises — which were inevitable — by making it clear at the outset what his values were on some of these important issues,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who has pushed for more liberal versions of health care reform. “While being transactional may help you get through the days in Washington and get things on the scoreboard, it creates a weird disconnect that most people in the country don’t know what you want and don’t feel they should rally to your side.”
The gap between promises of sweeping change and standard-issue Democratic Party policy platform was evident during Obama’s campaign.
Unlike most Democrats, Obama won the nomination without the support of liberal union leaders, bloggers, and members of Congress, most of whom rallied around him only after he had effectively become the Democratic nominee. Running as an outsider, he wasn’t forced to match his sweeping pledges of change to specific commitments to interest groups, and some current claims of betrayal may have more to do with the hope Obama inspired than with the commitments he made.
The abrupt pivot from the politics of hope to the politics of the possible began the day before Obama was elected, when word leaked that he had offered the post of White House chief of staff to Rahm Emanuel, a Washington veteran and dealmaker who represented little of what Obama had campaigned on. And the administration has come through on that promise, with ambitious goals — notably health care reforms — pursued more through back room deals with industry than mass mobilizations of ordinary citizens.
Perhaps the first to complain were gays and lesbians, who found an administration living in the shadow of Bill Clinton’s disastrous attempt early in his first term to end a ban on gays in the military. Obama had promised on the campaign trail to be a “fierce advocate” on behalf of gay rights and to fight to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. But as a series of states legalized same-sex marriage in 2009, he offered minor gestures, such as naming a gay ambassador to New Zealand.
“I don’t think anyone expected too much. He created those expectations,” said David Mixner, a gay activist who said the Obama letdown was worse than that of the early Clinton years, when Mixner, a major Clinton fundraiser, was arrested outside the White House in protest. Mixner said he’s even more disappointed by Obama.
“He really came to the American people and said, ‘I’m going to represent powerful change — and I think people believed him',” he said.
Hispanic leaders have also found themselves losing patience with the Obama White House. The president promised to make immigration reform a “top priority” during his first year in office, and he won overwhelming Hispanic support against a southwestern Republican, John McCain, once known for his appeal to Hispanic voters.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, fed up with the delay, finally introduced legislation this week over the conspicuous silence of a distracted White House.
“We have a president who received a mandate and addressed the [immigration] issue specifically as one he would aggressively pursue,” said Texas Rep. Charlie Gonzalez. “We told people this is what we’re going to do and we need to do it — and you need to do it not just in good faith, but you need to make a really sincere and all-out effort.”
He said he’s optimistic a bill will pass next year but remarked on the White House silence, so far, on the new legislation.
“There has to be some acknowledgement that a bill has been filed,” Gonzalez said.
Obama’s foreign policy has produced some of the sharpest breaks with the left, though anti-war activists — attracted to his initial opposition to the Iraq war — were always suspicious of his tough talk on Afghanistan and moderate views on Iraq. Civil libertarians have bridled at one of Obama’s most dramatic deferred promises, his aim to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in his first year in office; instead, the aides leading that charge were purged.
The discomfort among labor unions that has been brought most dramatically to the fore by the health care debate. Union leaders spent much of the year repeating to an increasingly skeptical press the evidently hollow promise that the White House would fight for the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill aimed at making organizing easier.
The act never came close to congressional passage, and the White House barely lifted a finger to help it. Now labor is particularly incensed by a plan to tax expensive health care plans such as those held by many public workers. Even the union leader closest to the White House, SEIU President Andrew Stern, felt obliged Thursday to press Obama on his own commitments.
“President Obama must remember his own words from the campaign,” Stern wrote members. “His call of ‘Yes We Can’ was not just to us, not just to the millions of people who voted for him, but to himself. We all stood shoulder to shoulder with the president during his hard-fought campaign. And, we will continue to stand with him, but he must fight for the reform we all know is possible.”
Labor insiders say their leaders were genuinely shocked by the shape of the final legislation.
“We thought it would be a little less robust,” one said. “But they went and pulled the rug right out.”
The administration and its allies argue that it has merely reckoned with reality.
“I think everybody who is part of the Obama coalition recognized that the first order of business had to be the economy and that we needed to focus on that and that we need to continue to focus on that until it turns around,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen told POLITICO Thursday. “In talking to labor, their No. 1 priority was getting the economy turned around.”
And it wasn’t just the economy. A united Republican opposition scuttled hopes of a new politics. Presidential efforts would not have won for interest groups’ prized priorities the required 60 votes in the Senate, according to administration officials. And the passage of health care reform, one official predicted, will send Obama’s approval rating up past 60% and restore his supporters’ enthusiasm.
“Some of the analysis we've seen about the base of our party might be more of a temporal argument about where things are now,” Sen. Robert Casey (D-Pa.) told POLITICO. "Give him a little more time.”
But for now, the anger has consequences. With established liberal organizations biting their tongues and standing with the White House, others are filling the gap, raising money and getting attention by attacking Obama from his left. The old Dean campaign organization, Democracy for America, has returned to join the health care debate with an attack on the individual mandate.
The blog FireDogLake has developed a political action arm aiming darts at Emanuel. And the new Progressive Change Campaign Committee has carved out a role as the MoveOn.org of the left flank.
“We will be publicly shaming President Obama until he threatens Joe Lieberman's committee chairmanship and hits the campaign trail for the public option in states like Maine and Connecticut,” said one of the group’s founders, Adam Green. “If at the end of the day, President Obama is so weak that he can't get Joe Lieberman in line, progressives will be perfectly fine killing the current corporate-giveaway bill and starting over again in reconciliation.”
Labor Democrats argue that one of the reasons for the 1994 Republican landslide was union voters’ alienation over the White House’s trade politics. It could happen again next year.
“Midlevel union leaders sat on their their hands in the midterm election — when the turnout programs are more critical,” said Steve Rosenthal, a veteran union political consultant. “If [health care] goes through with a tax on benefits and no public option, and then there’s no action on the Employee Free Choice Act, it’ll be a disaster.”
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Sources: Politico, MSNBC, Firedoglake, MoveOn.org, AFL-CIO, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Google Maps
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