whoa there! you’re saying obama’s liberal? When did that happen?

What I’m saying is, basically: Many of the policies Obama has advocated, in particular things like the bank bailouts, were far more progressive than people think, because quite frankly I don’t think people understand what would have happened had he not done them (i.e., essentially people are complaining about a policy that would have screwed everyone about 10x worse than what we’ve seen so far if he hadn’t done them). Also, a lot of what he’s had to do vis a vis compromise has been forced by the Senate — note that the House has passed far more progressive legislation, which he would have signed had the Senate been able to get its act together: that is to say, we tend to put all the responsibility for what happens on one person, as though he or she were a dictator, even though the actual responsibility is systemic. And finally, human beings as a whole tend to react to deltas rather than absolutes, that is to say, if something is different from the baseline we’re expecting or hoping for, we react to that, and forget how bad things would be given the available or realistic alternative. If Gore had won in 2000, we’d have been complaining about him, no doubt, not having any idea how bad things would have been had Bush been president.

Well, that’s a matter of semantics, I suppose. If you think the word “liberal” refers to Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky, then he didn’t campaign as a liberal — but I think the word more commonly is used to refer to the more broad spectrum of left-of-center politics, including, say, Clinton, whereas “leftist” or “progressive” might be better terms for Chomsky et al. If I were to apply a phrase to Obama it would be pragmatist with progressive impulses and a desire for post-partisanship (a desire unlikely to be satisfied in the current political climate.)

mitsu: I’ve not posted here before. I assume you’re the same mitsu who occasionally comments at neo-neocon.

I’m a lifelong Democrat who started voting Republican after 9-11. Not surprisingly I don’t like Obama and I disagree with his policies, but I’m not here to hash that out.

What I don’t understand is your assessment that Obama is doing a “damn good job.” Even considering Obama’s performance from a supporter’s viewpoint, that’s a hard claim for me to buy.

Those liberals who are dissatisfied aren’t just complaining because Obama isn’t sufficiently progressive for them. Obama hasn’t accomplished much and he has set back the cause of the Democratic Party.

Aside from the stimulus and the taking over two car companies — which aren’t obvious wins — Obama has little to show for his first year in the White House.

* Obama’s signature healthcare and energy bills have yet to pass and likely will not unless drastically scaled down.
* The economy remains stagnant and unemployment hovers around 10% — two points higher than promised when the stimulus passed.
* Obama’s poll numbers have suffered the steepest first year decline since Truman.
* The Democratic Party is in retreat in the polls and in recent elections, and faces very tough, possibly catastrophic, declines in the mid-term elections.
* Republicans, conservatives, and Tea Party members are resurgent and confident — a remarkable turnaround given Obama’s skyhigh polls and the predictions of a big FDR-style realignment due to Obama’s election.
* In foreign policy, aside from vague “People like us again!” polls, Obama has no wins either. Iran has ignored all of Obama’s overtures and deadlines, Russia and China are no closer to being allies, attempts to re-energize Israel-Palestine negotiations have failed and alienated Israel, and it looks like Obama is going to have to walk back the KSM NYC trial.

Whether one agrees or not with Obama’s policies, the fact remains is that in his first year he has burned much of his political capital with little return and the Democratic Party is now in near panic about upcoming elections.

Again, how is this a damn good job?

A graph from the Obama campaign website illustrates the effect of government policy since Obama took office:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/recoveryanniversary/

It takes time to dig out of the huge hole we were in at the end of the disastrous Bush Administration.

Yes, it’s impossible to re-argue all the issues vis a vis the financial meltdown in a comments section. And the roots of the meltdown do begin prior to 2000. However, most of the “blame on Democrats” which I have seen simply don’t stand up to objective inquiry — I am aware some Republicans blame programs designed to expand housing availability to low-income people and minorities — however, an actual analysis of that particular program shows that because those loans were given out with careful underwriting, even though they were to low-income folks, they did not default at levels any higher than prime loans. The main problem with the financial crisis came from no-doc loans and other risky loans which inflated the market, and these were based on the fact that you could securitize loans in the wake of the demise of various regulations including Glass-Steagall and others. I don’t actually think (unlike some of my liberal and leftist friends) that there was any conspiracy here; I think we were seeing a classic bubble market which happens whenever there is insufficient regulation in a market. It doesn’t require evil intent on anyone’s part — bubbles happen all the time.

In this specific case the bubble happened to be fueled by an inappropriate application of the Gaussian copula function, which I won’t try to explain at length here but this article does a good job of talking about it:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all

but in essence this was just the thing that went wrong in this case — there were a series of financial crashes after Reagan deregulated the economy — the S&L crisis, the LTCM debacle, the tech bubble, and now the housing bubble. Bubbles are inevitable when you let markets run without much regulation. Our country went through a series of such bubbles and crashes during the 19th century, culminating with the Great Depression — FDR’s policies and Keynesian economics put our country on a path of long-term stability and expansion which lasted for about 50 years. (The irony is the 50’s, which many conservatives point to as a sort of paragon of lost American greatness, was that way primarily due to the stabilizing impact of New Deal regulations).

Bush to my mind was disastrous on a number of fronts — I believe we may have forestalled 9/11 if he’d been more on the ball with national security in the early days. I think the Iraq war was a dangerous diversion from the primary battle in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein was a tin pot dictator who was not a serious threat to the United States. Bush vastly increased the deficit by passing unsustainable tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously vastly increasing government spending. And, he sat idly by while a gigantic financial bubble inflated during his presidency, whose popping could have started a new Great Depression.

I certainly agree that Obama is at a popular low, now, though he is still outpolling Republicans. I think he’ll turn it around, now that he realizes he has to get out in front of the debates and not be quite as passive with Congress. But in terms of policy I think he’s done a great job and has absolutely turned things around — we would have been in far worse shape otherwise. Will he be reelected? It takes a while before the effects of policy come home to roost — Bush’s policies were awful but it took 6 years for Americans to realize it. We’re still suffering from them but now people have blamed Obama for them (quite unfairly).

>I don’t see how you can blame Bush

Since Bush was president for nearly 8 years prior to the financial meltdown, the idea that Bush bears no responsibility for it would only make sense if you believe that presidents in general bear no responsibility for economic management, or, even less plausibly, that the causes of the financial meltdown all occurred a decade earlier and were unstoppable in over 8 years of governance. I really think you ought to consider the possibility that it is you who is viewing Bush under a very partisan lens.

And suffice it to say I and most of us on the left certainly do not believe Obama’s policies have been anything like “leftist” — stimulus spending was absolutely right and prudent. The health care bill didn’t even have a public option in it by the time it got through Congress, and was a bill that was quite similar to Republican proposals in years past. Objectively this view of him is inaccurate. Of course, I agree that this is a narrative that has been pushed by the right, but it is, in a word, wrong. That’s a misperception Obama is going to have to work harder to correct.

In any event, I don’t really and have never been interested in getting into a lengthy debate in the comments section — one of the things I never liked about USENET was the excessive debating going on. If you’d like to discuss this further feel free to email me or email me a link to your blog, if you have one, and we can “debate” by making comments in our own blogs that, if you wish, reference each other. I don’t really want to have this sort of dynamic however in my comments, so I’m going to close comments here.