I keep coming back to wondering what in the world Obama is thinking. Why does he not see the Republicans for what they are?
I still cant get a satisfying answer for that, but Digby gets a little traction.
When Bush came in and blew a hole in the hard won balanced budget by giving tax cuts to millionaires, it was finally irrefutable to even the die-hards that it had all been a fools game and that the DLC experiment (pragmatic triangulation) was a failure. It was clear that the Republicans had become ideologically bankrupt political terrorists and the Democrats had basically done their dirty work for them.
Barack Obama, however, has never agreed with that. Indeed, Sargent is right that he primarily sells himself as a conciliator and a bipartisan deal maker who is doing the best he can in a hostile situation. But then Clinton did too. In fact, all Democrats have thought that since the 1980s. The problem for Obama is that unlike Clinton, the experiment in “pragmatic, non-ideological” politics in the age of GOP nihilism has already been tried. And it failed. (They may have had a nice party for a while, but the hangover is one for the books.) He’s living in the past and liberals are trying to drag him into the present.
(snip)
His stimulus program was half tax cuts. His economic advisors are mostly centrists and he has seemed to place a huge amount of faith in business to take the lead in fixing the economy. He may think he’s “a pragmatic, non-ideological” politician but what he is in practice is a centrist. And the center is not where it used to be.
And that’s why liberals and progressives are so frustrated. It’s not just that they object to centrism on an ideological basis, which they do. It’s that in this age of GOP political terrorism, centrists are effectively allies of the right wing. They foolishly thought that in a time of major economic crisis, discredited centrist and conservative ideology, a large congressional majority and a Democrat in the White House you might see just a little bit more of a push for real liberal policies. And unlike the “pragmatic” activist base of the 1990s which was sort of watching from the sidelines to see if this New Democrat thing might work and give us liberal solutions without the “baggage” of government, today’s activist base has no such illusions.