As Dan pointed out over the weekend, it’s not just the loony left anymore who are getting annoyed with the president and Democratic leadership in general. Obama 2008’s deputy national campaign director Steve Hildebrand, who orchestrated a lot of those wildly successful field operations that propelled him to the Democratic nomination, spoke out in an interview with Politico today.
“I am one of the millions of frustrated Americans who want to see Washington do more than it’s doing right now,” said Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager who oversaw the Obama campaign’s field organization and was an architect of his early, crucial victories over Sen. Hillary Clinton in Iowa and South Carolina.
Obama, he said, “needs to be more bold in his leadership.”
“I’m not going to just sit by the curb and let these folks get away with a lack of performance for the American people,” he said, speaking of Washington’s Democratic leadership as a whole. “I want change just as much as a majority of Americans do, and I’m one of the many Americans who are losing patience.”
Hildebrand, who was first annoyed at Obama’s failure on gay rights, went on to show some hope for change later in the interview.
“He needs to — much like he did yesterday in that speech [to a union audience in Cincinnati], much like he’ll do, I assume, [in an address to Congress] on Wednesday — rally the American people to force change on Washington,” Hildebrand said. “Change is not going to come by people in the Beltway deciding we should have change — it’s going to come because they’re feeling pressure from all over the country.”
While we’re at it, Robert Reich describes the public option and gives suggestions for action in a little over two minutes. You should watch it.
That video boils it down, doesn’t it? Almost to the point where there’s no water left in the kettle. Act now or get burned.
Was the left loony when it opposed going to war in Iraq? Or should it have patiently waited 4 years for moderates in the Democratic party to admit their mistakes? f
Was the left loony when people criticized Obama’s corporate cabinet, which included Republicans who have done nothing to assist him in getting Republican party votes? Hildebrand thought so. He lectured them about how “This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-hild…
So when is the right time? Oh, right. Never. Because only the not-loony “insiders” are allowed to criticize Democrats. The left is supposed to vote Democratic, but is otherwise supposed to shut up. But wait, who is going to organize people “outside the beltway” to support Obama and health care reform, if not the left?
Liberals without a left are a sad sight to see. We gotta drop this “loony left” jargon, and liberals have to forge a new alliance with the left, or else the “center” will shift ever further to the right under Democratic party leadership.
It is worth noting that Hildebrand was shut out of the new administration when Obama was elected…so it could easily be said he has an agenda of his own.
We can either go bankrupt by listening to the Red Staters in the Republic Party (who are almost all ON socialized medicine – like Medicare, Medicaid, VA, active military care) – or we can spend HALF as much and ignore their hue and cry and just do single payer national health care AND LIVE 8-10 YEARS LONGER.
The choice is yours – but only young people will pay for it, cause the old white guys in the Republic Party aren’t paying for it.
Here is a flow chart that further simplifies the issue:
http://laist.com/2009/08/21/the_healthca…
Thanks for the link, Medina. The flowchart explains it simply and beautifully.
I’ll take the “looney” but CORRECT left over two-faced cowardly liberals ANY DAY. Sad thing is the liberals have moved so far to the right, chasing the Democrats, that they’ve rendered themselves irrelevant. Liberalism is dead. Long live the left.
Well, I know it’s a symbolic gesture at best, but nontheless I just forwarded Reich’s video on to 50 people on my e-mail contact list.
When Obama succeeds in passing health care legislation and restoring the economy, we’ll see how many people actually care about liberal fundamentals. They’re important but his political fate isn’t wrapped in them.
People consistently count Obama out and time and time agan, they’re proven wrong. People underestimate his abilities at their own peril. I remember when the Clinton supporters on the SLOG kept claiming that Obama was a pretender to the throne who would soon lose to the superior Clinton machine. They were wrong. Then there were the bitter Clinton supporters and Republicans who claimed that Obama would get slammed by the more experienced McCain and that somehow Palin would seal the deal. Clearly, that proved to be premature folly.
And here we are once again doubting Obama’s abilities. While everyone has been emphasizing the loudmouths at the town hall meetings (who are barely on the national radar anymore), his team have been quiety negotiating behind the scenes, which is why, as the NY Times reported today, the legislation has a good chance of ACTUALLY passing.
But liberals actually seem to want Obama to fail to confirm their beliefs about the moribund state of our government, one that has, let’s face it, earned some scorn over the years. But he will probably pass the legislation, once again gamely turning an exaggerated vision of failure into a political success.
Which leaves me to wonder what the next point of hysteria will be focused on.
And yes, people, I was a public option. But sometimes we don’t get what we want RIGHT NOW.
CORRECTION: I WANT a public option.
@Jizzlobber: Yes, thanks. That sums up exactly my feelings on the matter. In a perfect world, we would have had public health insurance a long time ago, and we would be talking about expanding Seattle’s rail transit system rather than inaugurating its first line.
But we are a long way from that world. The best politicians in the world can’t make things just magically happen: they have to work within the constraints of the current political environment to get things done.
Yes, we should have a public option. But if what we can get right now are quality incentives, “pre-existing condition” reforms and more (but not universal) coverage, that will still improve the state of the American health care system by a lot. And by a lot *more* than Clinton’s administration did.
A lot of people have said that Ted Kennedy was one of the greatest legislators in our history. And he did some really good things in his Senate career. But if you compare what he accomplished in all those years with what people are expecting of Obama in 9 months, it’s not much.