Absolutely–unless we are grading on some impossible-to-adjudicate basis of “for their respective times”. What did FDR do to regulate the environment? To guarantee equal rights for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people? What about for blacks and Latinos? (Mississippi’s all-white vote went 98% for FDR in 1936.) What were his programmes for heatlh care, housing, and food for the poor? (After all, WPA and CCC were “workfare” at best.) What percentage of the GDP was spent on social programmes? What kind of regulation of the workplace was there for safety in those pre-OSHA days? (Heck, based on legislation signed, you could argue Nixon was more liberal than FDR.) What did he do to provide for rights of the accused and for decent treatment of prisoners?
To me, public policy as concerns race prejudice is one of the most important ways in which I judge presidents. So before LBJ, there’s really only one president who impresses me, and that’s Ulysses Grant. (Truman gets an honourable mention for desegregating the armed forces, and JFK gets an “incomplete” but I have my doubts about whether he would have gone as far as LBJ did.) And the fact that Grant was president more than a half century earlier than FDR says that the “for their time” standard is not a fair yardstick after all.
You mean where ultra-right wing parties are ascendant? In any event, we can’t just say “look at the left wing tilt to other countries’ politics (mostly in Europe): no reason we shouldn’t do that here.” This ignores the profoundly libertarian and Puritan ethos the United States was founded on, and which attracted similarly thinking immigrants from Europe (who, by leaving, left their countries of origin more secular and communitarian/progressive). We can’t just do like Europe because we don’t have their electorate. IMO Obama has gotten us as close to that as is humanly possible (which is why he has aroused such great ire among the Tea Party crowd).
That’s absolutely untrue. While they were in those seats, they voted for Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership, whcih makes a big difference; and they agreed to an admittedly watered-down compromise version of HCR which is still a half a loaf and still better than none. The Republicans who replaced them would not have voted for any kind of HCR, so how can you say it makes no difference? Those were as far left as those districts were ever going to go: our best case scenario.
Look, I am in my forties and have not had health insurance since I was in my twenties (though I do have several thousand dollars in unpaid hospital bills that I periodically get hounded about). This is real for me. And it matters to me whether Obamacare is allowed to come online in 2014. No public option, but it will still be a great boon to me and allow me to start going to the doctor at a phase in my life when I really need to be able to! So it kind of pisses me off to read all these complaints from “progressives” who make the perfect the enemy of the good, even as they probably will have health insurance regardless of who wins the election.