Events | 2009.08.30
Change is tough. So liberals can't just leave it to Obama | Michael Tomasky
For euphoria to give way to disillusionment is premature. Instead, supporters should battle for his healthcare bill
I must report to you that the mood is somewhat grim these days among American liberals. Some feel President Obama has already sold them out. Others are angrier at conservatives and their deliberate lies about aspects of healthcare reform. But even many in this latter cohort think the White House hasn\'t been pushing back against the lies hard enough. Either way, expectations are diminished – nerves are fraying, temples are greying.
What a change from just six to nine months ago. During that period, from the wake of Barack Obama \'s victory through the first 100 days, liberal optimism was higher than it\'s been in this country for 40 years. One could believe, on a good day, not only that America would pass healthcare reform and climate change bills (that\'d be the easy part), but that Israelis and Palestinians and Iranians and Syrians and Indians and Pakistanis and North Koreans and you-name-it just might all wake up one day and text one another: you know, Obama\'s win suddenly makes us aware of how silly we\'ve been all these years. Let\'s grow up and make peace.
I had my moments. We all did. In general, I\'m pleased to report, I counselled that liberals should not delude themselves into over-interpreting the election results. They represented, I thought, a rejection of conservatism (for now), but not an embrace of liberalism. That would come only over time, and only if Obama and the congressional Democrats showed better results for people than Republicans had across a range of fronts. But the more common feeling was euphoria. So now, disillusionment has set in.
If Obama serves two terms, we are a mere 8% of the way into his tenure. That strikes me as a little early for people to be throwing in the towel. So the interesting question of the near future will be: can the Obama movement go from the euphoric phase, in which everything seemed possible, into a more realist phase in which people come to terms with the very difficult and far less exhilarating tasks associated with governing, and the often dissatisfying victories that result from the legislative process?
Liberals in my country tend to have a deeply romantic view of political movements. When we think of the civil rights movement, we think of the highlights, the stirring moments. Memory tricks us, and the media, which speak in such shorthand, help perpetuate the trick. So we tend to think that Rosa Parks sat on a bus, Martin Luther King gave some great speeches, decent Americans recoiled at racist violence on the nightly news, and boom, change happened. The reality was that nine long years passed from Parks\'s act of civil disobedience until Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill – nine years of often mundane and inglorious work. And even then, the civil rights bill didn\'t really fix the problem of African Americans being denied the vote, so Congress had to go back the next year and pass the voting rights act.
Ditto with Franklin Roosevelt, to whom Obama is often unflatteringly compared. FDR, the comparers say, fought the right tooth and nail, took no prisoners and was unapologetically liberal, even leftwing by today\'s standards. Many very important points are left out of this comparison. Roosevelt made lots of mistakes – the bill he\'d intended as the landmark legislation of his first year, the national industrial recovery act, was an abysmal failure, eventually struck down as unconstitutional by the supreme court. Unlike Obama, he didn\'t have to worry about Senate filibusters, which weren\'t really invoked in those days but which are a constant threat today. And while the right wing he faced was real, it wasn\'t nearly as well-financed and orchestrated as today\'s version, which even has its own national disinformation "news" network.
It\'s been a rocky month or six weeks, no denying it. The White House has made its share of errors. At the same time, I don\'t think anyone could have anticipated the rightwing response to the healthcare proposals. Forceful opposition and lies here and there, sure. But death panels and armed citizens coming to presidential rallies and comparisons to Hitler and polls showing that more than half of Republicans aren\'t convinced Obama is even an American citizen? No one saw this coming.
So now, liberals have to fight hard for something they\'re not terribly excited about. A health bill will likely have a very weak public option or it won\'t have one at all. But liberals will have to battle for that bill as if it\'s life and death (which in fact it will be for thousands of Americans), because its defeat would constitute a historic victory for the birthers and the gun-toters and the Hitler analogists. In the coming weeks, building toward a possible congressional vote in November, progressives will have to get out in force to show middle America that there\'s support for reform as well as opposition, even though they may find the final bill disappointing.
This is what movements do – they do the hard, slow work of winning political battles and changing public opinion over time. It isn\'t fun. It isn\'t something Will.i.am is going to make a clever and moving video about, and it offers precious few moments for YouTube. It takes years, which is a bummer, in a political culture that measures success and failure by the hour. The end of euphoria should lead not to disillusionment, but to seriousness of purpose.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]alcare-foreign-domestic-policy
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