Obama: Left-Wing Socialist or Right-Wing Collaborator?
There's a lovely firestorm brewing over Robert Gibbs' rather untactful statement about the "professional left." If you haven't seen some of it, there's a great piece over at FireDogLake. Go ahead and read it, sample some of the comments, then come on back here. I'll wait.
Okay, you're back, cool. Before I continue with this post, I have to disclose that I helped organize for Barack Obama during the 2008 primaries and general election. Worked my ass off, to tell the truth, and not just because I was campaigning in Texas. Mostly it was one hell of a brawl to get through the primaries (the Clintonistas offered a pretty good fight), and after that it was downhill, as no one in their right mind would have elected McCain/Palin. (Admit it, Republicans, they were a nightmare matchup.)
First of all, Democrats are far from being the scary, unpatriotic, mentally deranged people that Limbaugh and Beck say they are. They're very smart people, and not just educated, but open-minded too. They think deeply about things, and care about people and outcomes.
In point of fact, they think too much. Care too much. There, I said it.
More than 80% of my time was spent keeping fellow Democrats focused on the goal: win the White House, at least in our little neck of the woods. The perfect is the enemy of the good. You won't get everything you want. We're not trying to get 100% consensus on everything, we're trying to build a winning coalition.
It seemed like every day brought a new batch of news that caused abject panic, fright, and despair. We'd gone through 8 long years of the Bush-Cheney dictatorship and couldn't stand the thought of 4 more years of Republican madness. Democrats are like cats--we're not easily herded. It's the right wing that's better at collective action, et cetera.
Never once in 11 months of work did I ever kid myself that Obama was a progressive. I saw him as someone who would get some stuff done, maybe reverse the great harm done to us by Republicans in the previous administration. Some of this is likely due to the fact that I consider myself a centrist. I guess we all just project what we want onto the leaders we have.
Okay, so now we've got Obama as president. He's pulled off the minor miracle of healthcare reform. It appears that his wildly unpopular deficit-busting approaches to fighting the recession may actually keep us from tipping over into a cataclysmic Depression. The war in Iraq is winding down, and so on and so forth.
Continued on the next page
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