By Ben Adler
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Feb 4, 2010
Has President Obama, the man who made even the dourest of liberals smile in 2008, finally made the left not just grouchy but downright angry? And it will it come back to bite his party in the midterms this fall? Leading liberals in the blogosphere, the labor movement, and the think tanks say it might.
It's not hard to understand the psychology. Imagine you are a 60-year-old lefty. You came of age in the late 1960s, rallying for peace and a more just society. The story of your adulthood has been one of persistent societal decline. First Richard Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, then Newt Gingrich, then George W. Bush seized the country, ground progress to a halt, and often reversed it. Elect a truly liberal president, an intellectual, multiracial former urban community organizer, say, with a strong electoral mandate and large congressional majorities, and our Treasury should be filled with the taxes of hedge-fund managers. The EPA should be doing a brisk business selling carbon credits in no time.
The hopes that you would have laid on Obama were thus extraordinary, stoked by the grandiose conjecture of political pundits that Obama's election may signal a Rooseveltian or Reaganite paradigm shift in the polity. Obama's moderation, from choosing a centrist, bipartisan cabinet, to choosing a hawkish path on Afghanistan, quickly brought liberals down to a grumpy reality. But they set about supporting the president's plans for economic stimulus and health-care reform, and trained their ire at Republicans who threatened to filibuster at unprecedented levels and Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson who extracted enormous compromises from the White House.
(More here.)
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