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Obama and Liberals: A Counter-Productive Relationship













Prioritizing political allegiance to their leader was exactly the mistake the Right made for the first several years of the Bush presidency.  Even Bill Kristol admitted in The New York Times:  "Bush was the movement and the cause."  An entire creepy cottage industry arose on the Right devoted to venerating George W. Bush.  And it wasn't until well into his second term, when his popularity had already collapsed, that they began opposing him in a few isolated cases when he deviated from their beliefs -- on immigration reform, the Harriet Miers nomination, Dubai ports, the TARP bailout and the like.  But, by then, it was too late:  Bush became synonymous with "conservatism" because the latter wasn't really about anything other than supporting the President no matter what he did.  The ideological movement and their political leader had merged, and it was destructive for both of them.

Part of the political shrewdness of Obama has been that he's been able to actually convince huge numbers of liberals that it's a good thing when he ignores and even stomps on their political ideals, that it's something they should celebrate and even be grateful for.  Hordes of Obama-loving liberals are still marching around paying homage to the empty mantras of "pragmatism" and "post-partisan harmony" -- the terms used to justify and even glorify Obama's repudiation of their own political values.  Talk Left's Armando described the oddness of this mentality:

As I wrote earlier in a comment, "up yours" to the ACLU used to be known as "triangulation" when a certain William Jefferson Clinton did it. Today it is known as "11 dimensional chess." Another episode today demonstrates the transformation of "triangulation" into "11 dimensional chess:"

Sen. Tom Harkin, a liberal Democrat from Iowa, said fellow Democrats had surrendered too much in a bid to appease three moderate Republicans who can ensure passage in the Senate.

"I think our side gave in too much in order to appease a few people," he said in a hallway interview in the Capitol earlier on Wednesday. He said Democrats should have dared Republicans to filibuster and "see what the public outcry" would have been. "I think the people are getting shortchanged."

Imagine if Bill Clinton had capitulated like this to a Republican Congress in 1995? Or said "up yours" to the ACLU the way Obama did? Do you think the cries of "sellout" would be hard to find today? Me neither.

Political ideas and values that have no meaningful pressure being exerted on their behalf will always be those that are most ignored.  That's just the most basic rule of politics.  Last year, Accountability Now was created to provide exactly that pushback against political incumbents, and there will be a major announcement very soon along with its formal launch (an Executive Director has been hired and much of the infrastructre has been created and the groundwork laid).   For the moment, on one issue after the next, one can vividly observe the harm that comes from a political faction being beholden to a leader rather than to any actual ideas or political principles.

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