"I think we are approaching a breaking point" with President Obama, said NY's Congressman Jerry Nadler to Dana Milbank, whose column this morning surveys "the feeling of betrayal" by Capitol Hill's assorted progressive Nadlers to the singularly pragmatic Obama.
Almost instantly we're thrust by Milbank into the smoldering fires of progressive discontent: They seethe over Obama's "Extending Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans" (which for the unemployed paid the rent and kept food on the table); over Obama's "Keeping the Guantanamo Bay prison open" (which Congress, not Obama, has done); over Obama's "Declining to support a larger economic stimulus, or a second one" (the first of which was never politically possible, the second of which is a political fantasy); over Obama's "Foot-dragging on climate change" (which in a weak economy is an unavoidable corollary); over Obama's "Resisting calls to support gay marriage" (from progs, perhaps the most insulting "Yeah, but what have you done for us lately" ever); over Obama's "Surging troops into Afghanistan and removing them too slowly" (the build-up of which was a campaign pledge and it has, after all, had its geopolitical successes, while the pace of any withdrawal is always "too slow" for war opponents); over Obama's "Offering up too many budget cuts in negotiations" (I assume they mean those reportedly enormous cuts that in reality turned out to be Boehner-humiliating peanuts?); and over Obama's "Hesitating to nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the new financial regulatory agency" (that would be the Elizabeth Warren who at Obama's request organized the agency and whose nomination can't survive a filibuster and whose recess appointment would ignite a political [and legal] explosion within the already raging debt-ceiling war).
From that list I omitted another of Milbank's itemized Obamian "transgressions," for it deserves a separate, special and honored mention; in addition, it was the issue whose moment represented my -- and for all I know Obama's -- "breaking point" with progressives: "Surrendering on the public option."
I won't bore you or myself into a catatonic seizure with a painfully extended revisit to, or delineated history of, that dreadful and needlessly protracted affair. Let's just recall that Obama's "surrender" was as roughly frivolous and carefree -- as progressives have labored to characterize it -- as Field Marshal Paulus' at Stalingrad. For days, weeks, months the self-destructive thing dragged out at demagogically progressive pols' insistence; but hey, they were from safe districts or states, pandering to their base, so what did they care that the public option simply, irrefutably did not have the votes to pass the Senate?
Meanwhile, about the jobs crisis -- the electorate's #1 worry -- those Democratic majorities sat idle, which radiated a public appearance of Democratic indifference, which in turn opened a massive breach into which Tea Party fanatics could charge. All the polling and every acute political instinct dictated that Congressional Dems should expeditiously conclude the best healthcare deal they could get (which, finally, they did) and then for Christ's sake move on to jobs creation -- or at least the bloody appearance thereof.
Obama understood almost from the get-go that there'd be no public option in the deal, and centrist Democrats and certainly the party's demagogic progressives knew there'd be no public option in the deal, and for damn sure the Republicans knew it; I knew it, the press knew it, insincere progressive bloggers knew it, mental patients and schoolchildren and my border collie Jack knew it. Still, the public-option platoon self-righteously fought on, widening John Boehner's path to the speakership and the quite possibly clinically sociopathic Eric Cantor's to the majority leadership.
That -- the public-option debacle -- was my Ur-moment of profound disaffection, the flashing genesis, the spark of a blinding epiphany and incontrovertible enlightenment: contemporary progressives, by and large, are imbeciles. I suspect that Obama, at about that time, also sensed some recalculating ground shifting beneath him.
I persist, as does Obama, in a philosophical fidelity to progressive goals. But, good God, those progressives themselves, what an embarrassing, counterproductive, pathologically hypervirtuous bunch of infantile nincompoops they can be.