Telling Obama that he’d better toe the line:
Leading liberals are already thinking the unthinkable: Challenging President Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2012.
According to a report on the left-leaning Huffington Post website, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and Eugene Robinson, an African-American national columnist for The Washington Post, discussed just such a possibility Thursday night. Robinson said Obama needs to be careful how he handles the health care reform issue and the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Olbermann said the president has “compromised on everything so far and as self-defeating as it may be, the progressive caucus and progressives would abandon him if necessary, if this was to be the policy of this administration into 2012. If it’s necessary to find somebody to run against him, I think they’d do it, no matter how destructive that may seem.”
This is something that I’m picking up on in leftist circles: a dismay that Obama and Co aren’t just muscling leftism through. After all, with the White House and solid majorities in Congress, it should be easy, right? It seems so, but only if you’re a liberal and thus think in tyrannical terms. To liberals, a win means absolutely – in other words, if they cross the finish line first, they get it all. They forget that Obama only got 52% of the vote – ie, one percentage point more than Bush got in 2004, and no liberal out there in 2005 thought that President Bush should have been able to rule by decree. Meanwhile, the Democrats House majority is by grace of 50 Democrats holding GOP seats – and winning those seats by being as close to GOP as you can get without changing party registration. Take away those 50 and pare away the Senate Democrats who also ran on GOP platforms, and you can see that even in this glory day of Obamunism, the Democrat majority is thin and easily broken.
But that, once again, is not how our liberals view it – Obama won and the Democrats won and the war in Iraq is supposed to be over, gay marriage implemented and President Bush up on war crimes charges. That they aren’t getting these things is starting to anger the left. Right now, its mostly being directed at Congressional Democrats – but it can easily be swung in Obama’s direction.
So, Obama will shortly have a choice – ditch the left and possibly draw a primary or Third Party challenger in 2012 (but still have a chance of winning) or embrace the left and have a united Democratic party to be trounced by the GOP and Independents coming together. Be interesting to see how it plays out.
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