why dems are discouraged

         When Barack Obama became president, I hadn’t set a firm date for retirement, but knew it would come before he finished a second term, perhaps even a first.  I thought then that one thing I could look forward to in retirement was having the time and the resources to actively promote Obama’s agenda.  I did in fact retire 6 months ago, but have engaged in no such promotion largely because, sadly, I can’t find an agenda to promote.

            To be fair, the President has claimed three pieces of legislation—the stimulus bill, health care reform and financial reform—that it’s tempting to call “major,” but while each of them accomplishes something, in their final forms each of them contains so many compromises and cave-ins that it’s hard not to focus more on what they don’t accomplish than what they do.

           

            The stimulus bill unquestionably staved off a major depression, but by opting for the smallest possible dollar figure instead of the much higher figure most reputable economists said was necessary, Obama gave us a bill that didn’t so much stimulate the economy as keep it from flatlining.

                       

            The health care bill unquestionably reins in the most rapacious practices of the insurance industry, but Obama opted not to demand the one thing that would have truly transformed our health care system—a public option.

            The financial reform bill unquestionably provides greater oversight of the financial sector and more protection for consumers.  But again Obama punted on the two things true financial reform had to include: fully restoring the Glass-Steagall act that required banks to be banks and not full-spectrum investment companies, and putting regulations in place to end the Wall Street compensation system that rewards traders for high-risk short term gains while insulating them from long-term losses.

            In each of these cases, the President’s defense is that something is better than nothing, and there is a clear logic to that defense.  What discourages me—and many other liberals—is that the President never demanded more than the something he got.  Congress was never asked to approve a larger stimulus package, the Senate was never required to vote on a public option, and neither chamber of congress was confronted with either of the clearly necessary financial reforms.

            The President, and most Democrats, have characterized the Republicans as the party of No, but on each of these big pieces of legislation, they didn’t actually have to be that.  All they had to be was the party of Might Say No.

            It’s entirely possible, likely even, that if a vote on, for example, the public option had come up in the Senate, Republicans would unanimously have voted no.  They would probably been joined in that no by a few Democrats.  But it’s not as though voting on a bill that included the public option would have precluded voting later on one that didn’t have it.  And it’s entirely likely that  the Democrat and Independent voters who combined to elect Obama would be significantly more energized and enthusiastic now if they saw leadership from the President and from Harry Reid that was genuinely seeking the kind of change the Obama campaign seemed to promise.

            It is absolutely true that politics is the art of the possible, and it may very well be that what ultimately comprised these three big bills is all that was possible at this point in time.  What’s discouraging is that we’ll never know if that’s true because the President never demanded anything more.