Losing Faith

I hate to keep throwing fuel on the fire, but here is one more disappointed liberal columnist, Bob Herbert of the NYT, letting Obama have it:

It’s still early, but people are starting to lose faith in the president. I
hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama
but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in
the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle.
Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable
of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state
the country is in.

More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as
someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for
bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him
because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the
Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.

People want more from Mr. Obama. They want him to be their champion.
But they don’t feel that he is speaking to them in a language that they
understand. He is seen as more comfortable speaking the Wall Street lingo.
People don’t feel that the voices of anxiety are being heard.

Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe the economy really is turning around. Maybe Mr. Obama is working on a bipartisan deal that will take us a few small steps down the road to real health care reform.

It’s possible that we’ve been without mature leadership for so long
that it’s difficult to recognize it when we see it. Mr. Obama has proved the
naysayers wrong time and again. But if it turns out that this time he’s wrong,
hold onto your hats. Because right now there is no Plan B.