Getting what’s been gotten

It’s a real stretch but still tempting to say that in 2008 Candidate Obama acted the slick Madison Adman in overselling the idea of change, the idea of progress, while minimizing or altogether dismissing the unpleasant realities of working for both. Indeed, it’s more than just tempting for some among the utopian left; they pointedly accuse Obama of playing this very shell game, hence they’ll play no more because they’ll countenance the con artist no more.

Others among the disaffected progressive base acknowledge that the above accusation is wildly misguided. Both Candidate Obama and President Obama, they concede, have always balanced the spiritual rhetoric of progress with the realistic rhetoric of pushback. Obama, they admit, conned no one about the difficulties ahead; he both forecast and emphasized a prolonged and arduous struggle.

So why their persistent disaffection -- one virtually indistinguishable in degree from the utopians’ disaffection?

Answer: A fundamental misunderstanding of the vast difference between campaigning and governing, as beautifully reexpressed in the NY Times this morning by the uncomprehending and suddenly ubiquitous Adam Green, of BoldProgressives.org and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee:

“It’s great that President Obama is showing a fighting spirit in the weeks before an election, but what his former voters need to see is that same fighting spirit when he’s governing.”

Thus Green & Co.’s central complaint, one so cluelessly removed from the actual battlefields of governance and lawmaking as to leave one nearly in awe. 

It can be dispatched with ease, as President Obama did recently with respect to Mr. Green’s particularly pathological idée fixe, the public option:

“I could have had a knock-down, drag-out fight on the public option that might have energized [Rolling Stone] and The Huffington Post, and we would not have health care legislation now.”

The same held true for financial reform, and will – someday -- hold true for energy reform and immigration reform and tax reform and every other broken sector of U.S. policy. And by the way, the same held true for FDR and LBJ, for the New Deal and the Great Society; once legislation moved from concept to committee, the “fighting spirit” behind it mostly morphed into quiet negotiation and disagreeable compromise.

That’s the way it goes, and that, for better or worse, is the way it was designed to go, and that’s what some progressives just don’t seem to “get.”

Comments

[Adam Green]

Hi -- this is Adam Green. I addressed this point Monday night on MSNBC, giving a concrete example of how Bush "fought" and won in a governing context:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6tkWVe38Bs

[Phil Carpenter]

Yes, Mr. Green, you did cite one example, and I thank you for commenting. But there is no blog capacious enough or blogger indefatigable enough to cite the thousands of counter-examples, which essentially prove the rule.