Liberals annoyed that one election didn't change everything

I'll probably write more on this after I see whether the "Obama lost my vote" left cools down. For now...

There really is a tendency among American liberals, and I can't always suppress it myself, to seek political victory without having to ask for support from the, well, less enlightened citizens who vote in every election. So when a Democrat is elected president, liberals hope that he (someday she) will use his great and powerful office to force through progressive policy no matter what the polls say or what the opposition party does.

I don't know how this is supposed to work. A Democratic president doesn't have much leverage when he can't promise pork to legislators (as FDR and LBJ could do without any fuss from Fox News) and can't threaten to campaign against Democrats who buck him (even in FDR's day, voters hated the idea of even a popular president telling them who they should support for other offices). In 2011, it doesn't help that public opinion polls still show an intense aversion to the word "liberal" and that the last national election ended in a huge defeat for the Democratic Party. To repeat: The last national election was in 2010, not 2008, and the Democrats lost.

Not that Obama had that much power when he was first elected anyway. Dan Kennedy explains it well:

The flaw is in thinking that because Democrats control the White House and the Senate, then they shouldn’t let the Republican House push them around. This is a variation on the widely accepted (and wrong) idea we often heard during Obama’s first two years — that he and Democrats had no excuse for not getting what they wanted given that they controlled the White House and both branches of Congress.

In fact, and as should be obvious to anyone, a determined minority is far more powerful in our constitutional system than the majority, because members of that minority can just say no — and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do to change that no to yes. Especially with the Tea Party Republicans, many of whom were perfectly willing to drive the economy off a cliff by letting the government go into default.

What happened in the Senate, of course, is that under the Republicans — and it really has been an almost entirely Republican phenomenon — the filibuster became routine, which meant that a minority of 40 senators could prevent anything from happening. (This is compounded by the constitutional requirement that gives each state two senators, which tilts power toward small, Republican-leaning states.) Add to that a Republican House, and you’re left with a situation in which liberals fulminate about Obama’s weakness without having a clue as to how it might be otherwise.

There's probably not much that can be changed about the conservative, rural, small-state slant of our gunk-filled legislative process. But that's where the problem is. Putting someone else in the Oval Office isn't going to magically cure things.

Comments

[Chris VanHaight]

Finally, a clear-headed analysis. If the Democrats want to actually get anything done then they will have to make their case ... and not to "the American public" but to voters. We do not live in a democracy, we live in a republic, and voters, not Americans in general, elect the members of Congress and the president. And the voters, rightly or wrongly, like the Republican message better. And spare me the voter nullification sob song. If the rural poor can drag themselves forty miles to the polls (to vote for Tea Partyiers who will only throw them under the bus), urban voters should be able to take public transportation one stop to vote. But they don't. So things like this budget agreement is what they get. At least the Pentagon seems to be taking a real hit for a change as well.

[Robert David Sullivan]

Thanks for the comment, Chris!