Demanding Change

Arianna Huffington writes:

In a post about last month's Netroots Nation gathering in Las Vegas, Matt Yglesias wrote that at this year's event, "the dominant mood" was "depressed" and that he could feel a "considerable degree of ill will toward Barack Obama and his administration."

Those in the "disappointed" camp maintain that Obama presented himself one way to gain their support during the campaign and then, once he had it, ended up governing another way, turning his energies to winning over Republicans instead of changing the game in Washington. As Paul Krugman puts it, "Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?"

Those in the "not disappointed" camp claim it's not Obama's fault. He's the same Obama he was during the campaign, they say, and cite a host of logistical and structural reasons for why he had to make all the compromises. Among them: the huge mess left by the Bush administration; the deeper than expected financial crisis; the abuse of the filibuster by Senate Republicans; the intransigence of Blue Dog Democrats; the rise of the Tea Party movement; the right-wing attack machine; a media addicted to the notion of "bipartisanship." The list goes on and on.

So which side in the "disappointed/not disappointed" debate is right? And what accounts for this friction? Well, after two years of seeing a pattern being established, I think I have the answer. Progressives, for your own good, it's my duty to point something out to you: the president's just not that into you.

Sure, there's no doubting the impact of all the Washington realities listed above that have made Obama's first term a huge challenge. The GOP really has become obstructionist to an unprecedented and dangerous degree. There really is a formidable right-wing attack machine that doesn't care much about the truth. The Bush administration really did leave the country in shambles.

But as real as all that is, it's clear that Obama just doesn't have the fire in his belly that many activists thought he had. "The president," Yglesias writes, "likes to present himself as a 'pragmatist' uninterested in questions of ideology, and his political strategy is largely organized around a posture of unctuous reasonableness in which he never loses patience with the opposition or affiliates himself emotionally with the passions that drive activists."

And you know what? That's okay. It's not ideal, but it doesn't mean that Obama's first term can't be a success. What it means, however, is that those who voted for transformation can't simply sit back and wait for the man of their dreams to do it for them. That, as we've seen, is a recipe for frustration. And the sooner progressives realize this, the stronger they'll be and the more likely it is that the goals that Obama won America over with -- especially saving the middle class, the "North Star" of his campaign -- will be met.

As I argue in Third World America, what we need is Hope 2.0: the realization that change will not come from Washington or from one man; that real change will only come when enough people outside Washington demand it, and make it politically risky to stick to the status quo.