I do feel some disappointment in President Obama myself. This isn’t so much his stance on any particular issue , though, as it is his administration’s utter lack of negotiating skill. Who thinks it’s a good idea, especially when bargaining with a crowd who has no sense of ethics or fair play and who will use any means to realize their ends, to reveal all of your real goals as an opening to a negotiation? That kind of shit would get me fired.

Having said that, though, I think many on the far left fell for the media’s meme (mostly propagated by the likes of Faux News) that Obama is a flaming liberal who is looking to drag the country kicking and screaming to the far left extreme. That is, at best, a misrepresentation. I find that, on most issues, he’s tried to do pretty much what he said he’d do.

On those issues where we’re disappointed that Obama didn’t do more for the progressive agenda, we need to remember that even though he had a Democratic majority from ’09-’11, his agenda was obstructed every step of the way by those who’s primary objective is (as Mitch McConnell has repeatedly made clear) Mr. Obama’s defeat in ’12 rather than doing anything remotely good for the country. Especially since losing the House in the ’10 election, Obama’s hands have been mostly tied on nearly every progressive agenda item he may want to promote.

I just wish, given his charisma, he was half as effective at bringing his agenda to the American people in order to get it passed through a hostile Congress as Reagan or FDR was. I just wish he was half as hard a bargainer as Johnson was. I wish he employed people who were half as good at negotiation as Kennedy’s were. Even with the GOP obstructing as they are, there is still so much potential that, so far, is unrealized.

I think the animosity shown in this forum towards the “Firebaggers” comes from a well-founded fear that they’ll either succeed in dividing the Democratic vote or convince enough liberals to stay home on election day that they’ll end up handing the Senate or the White House (or both!) back to the GOP. After all, I believe Al Gore may well have won the presidency pretty handily if not for Nader and I believe we’d still have a Democratic House majority if the navel-gazers on the left hadn’t stayed home in such numbers in November of ’10.

Many far right evangelicals thought Reagan betrayed them on many of their pet social issues. Come the ’84 election, though, they stayed solidly behind him because they knew that a divided GOP vote might have resulted in a President Mondale. As progressives who care passionately about the good of our country, we’d do very well to remember that in 2012.

Mind-reading is fun.