Will the left wing destroy Obama?

Great Debates
21

^^This pretty much.

Xtisme is a diehard pragmatist. It makes no sense to him to berate “your guy” because whatever happens you don’t want “the other guy” to win.

Sadly this sort of pragmatism is exploited. “Your guy” doesn’t actually need to be good. He need not do the things he promised. He can do things you actively despise and note he said the opposite or gave no indication of doing those things when he was asking for our vote. All “your guy” needs to do is be just a bit more palatable than the other guy.

Candidates know this full well. The “hard left” will never vote for the republican candidate. The hard right will never vote for the democratic candidate. Some small percent in the middle is where the battle is fought.

During primaries candidates will heave sharply to the right or left then in the general they race for the center. Once elected fuck it…do what you want.

As long as we abide by xtisme’s sensibilities on this than that is what we get. It may be painful to lose an election or two but perhaps if voters held their candidates accountable and tossed them out the ones following on might figure out they had better keep (or at least sincerely try to keep) the promises they make.

A guy can wish…

22

Sure it’s true.

It’s what I call the McCain effect - support for Republicans on the SDMB varies inversely with their distance from the White House. McCain got some rather luke-warm support hereabouts, until he got the nomination. Then he got exactly the same treatment as any other Republican - “MONSTEREXTREMISTHOMOPHOBE!!!”

Etc.

Regards,
Shodan

23

With land sharks with laser beams attached to their heads. He’d do it for all of Obama’s Kenyan gold.

24

Only in your rather vivid imagination.

25

I doubt it. The left is none too happy with him, but we are far happier with him than any alternative out there. He might receive a challenge in the primaries, but it would take a major change in the electorate for him to lose the nomination. As this year is showing, who knows what the future holds.

I think the most important thing for the left is not the occupant of the White House, but the occupants of Congress. We need to destroy the conservative Democrats in the House and Senate, which did lose badly last November, but most seats went to Republicans, which is fine since that is what most of those districts are. Progressives need to hold their nose and allow that to happen. We had a Democratic majority, but nowhere near a progressive majority, and their agenda got buried in the rubble of the health care fiasco and stimulus bills. (The Employee Free Choice Act, real financial reform, a strong consumer and environmental protection agencies - all no shows.) If the left cannot get the legislation they want through the Congress, it does not matter much who is the White House to sign or veto it. And we are better off if the Republicans have Congress if everything goes tits up again.

As far as Obama’s actions outside the legislative arena, I think he has done okay, i.e. a grade of C. His hands have been tied with Guantanamo since everyone cried NIMBY when he tried to close it. He has wrapped up most operations in Iraq, but he is far too willing to continue drone strikes and the status quo in Afghanistan, but if there are no results by election season, I could see him shifting to a withdrawal there also. He is moving as far left as he can on gay rights, which I give him credit for since I think his personal beliefs are more centrist than the party’s stance.

Foreign policy is going through another 1989, and no one knows how it will play out, except that America may no longer to be able to bribe countries to accept ‘friendly’ dictators. I doubt any other president would be having that easy a time with it. (I shudder to think how McCain/Palin would have handled Egypt and the rest.)

So unless something truly radical happens, the left will not destroy him, but we will not allow him to take our votes for granted and he may find his fund raising will not be as easy as last time.

26

Seeing as how we’ve established that Obama is more centrist than leftist, who are all these moderate Repubublicans in Congress who have been voting with the President?

27

I thought you had kind of a point previously, but now you’re drifting off the beaten path: you seem to be forgetting the actual campaign. McCain veered to the right to win the nomination and then continued moving that way in the general. (Interesting that you mention homophobe since that’s one of the issues he flip flopped on.) I figured SDMB support for him would fade as people came to grips with the fact that he really was a conservative, but it faded more than I expected because he had to do more to prove his credentials as a conservative.

28

I’d like to see Anthony Weiner run in the primary if for no other reason than to see them debate.

29

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
Candidates know this full well. The “hard left” will never vote for the republican candidate. The hard right will never vote for the democratic candidate. Some small percent in the middle is where the battle is fought.
[/QUOTE]

No, but what they will do is either vote for some third party candidate with zero chance of winning or they simply won’t vote. Granted, I don’t think the ‘hard left’ is very large in the US, so the impact of this won’t be all that great. But their voice, so to speak is all out of proportion to their actual political weight…IOW, I don’t think they have a large enough base of folks who vote to make a difference, but they can and do raise a ruckus that gets into the public’s ear…same and the right wing noise machine.

I’m actually not sure what you were trying to say here. I’m sort of dog-less in this fight…while I voted for Obama and will most likely do so in the next election, I don’t have a huge stake in any of this. My own demographic probably consists of myself and maybe one or two other loopy quasi-libertarian moderates who lean left on some issues and right on others. I’m not making any statement that hard lefties (or hard righties) should or shouldn’t hold their nose and vote the lesser of two weevils. I was just asking the question of what, if any effect the hard left, who seems to be turning against Obama, will have on his continued presidency. Hell, I’m open to debating whether there are any such things as hard lefties (based on several cryptic posts in this thread there seems to be some doubt), who comprises the hard left (afaik Lenin wasn’t an American), or whether or not they are in fact turning on Obama or love him to death.

Well, they do what they like within the context of whether or not they have any expectations of getting elected again. I think a lot of candidates have ideas about what they will do when they get into the WH, assuming they win…but that these preconceptions shatter against the reality of actually having to govern a country of people like we have, or dealing with the sorts of issues we have to deal with. IMHO, lefties (and righties for that matter…and innies and outies too) focus on their own issues to the exclusion of anything else. They can do that because they don’t have to try and govern hundreds of millions of what are essentially cats…each having a less black and white outlook, and each seemingly wanting to go their own way and do their own thing, and expecting the government to want the same things they do. The president is like the chief cat herder.

On the right (the hard right), I think that they tend to just get quietly angry when their chosen leaders don’t do what they think they should. I know (from my dad) that there was a lot of pent up rage about Bush from the hard right because he didn’t push through all those pet right wing programs they thought he should. On the left, though, they are much more vocal and much more disposed to turn on their own if they don’t do what they think their leaders should…the auto response seems to be to go for the ankles at the first sign of dissension from the promised (or assumed) plan.

That’s true enough…if you actually believe that there is enough political support to get the ideal candidate for your viewpoint. Perhaps there is…perhaps there really is a large group of Americans who quietly believe in the hard left (or right) viewpoint, and just haven’t been galvanized enough to get out and vote. Perhaps all it will take is the spark to energize this hidden base and get them riled up enough to get off their asses and vote.

Then again, perhaps a saner path is to go with a compromise candidate that is at least quasi-sympathetic to some of your viewpoints and desires. To me, this is the optimal choice, since, to me ‘diehard pragmatist’ that I am, when you govern a diverse nation you have to be open to more than one political perspective or viewpoint. You need to weigh both the desires and wants of the majority (which, IMHO is the centrist view, sometimes slightly left, sometimes slightly right), but also the desires of both lunatic fringes…er, both of the political wings…as well. YMMV.

-XT

30

President, hell, Lugar’s not even going to survive his next Senate primary.

While there might be some truth to this, your portrayal is not exactly accurate, in that it leaves out the fact that pre-nomination McCain, particularly 2000 McCain, was a very different person than post-nomination McCain. He went completely batshit after the nomination; do you really think 2000 McCain would have chosen someone like Palin for his running mate if he had won the nomination?

31

The problem with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is that they were invasions. The U.S. military is not good at occupying hostile populations that are willing to fight back. Nevertheless, nothing can stand up to the U.S. Air Force.

The unpredictable factor here is the amount of support Muammar Gaddafi has among the people of Libya. I have not been able to find reliable information about that. If Gaddafi is quickly overthrown and replaced by a reasonably democratic government that is grateful for having received American support, this will be seen as a foreign policy victory for the President Obama. His approval rating will rise, and it will not matter what “the left wing” thinks about him.

If this becomes a messy and expensive stalemate, Obama will be in trouble, but he will be in trouble with his formidable enemies on the right. “The left wing” cannot destroy Obama because it is politically insignificant.

A good website to follow this on is Al Jazeera:

32

NDD, I think you posted this in the wrong thread. Doesn’t seem relevant.

-XT

33

Yes, he was different - he got the nomination.

The Usual Suspects weren’t going to vote for him no matter who he picked for a running mate.

It didn’t fade any more than it would have anyway. Don’t kid yourself - the SDMB is about 80% yellow dog Democrats.

Regards,
Shodan

34

He was different. During the 2000s, McCain voted for immigration reform, campaign finance reform, voted against the Bush Tax cuts and supported cap-and-trade. When he started running for the '08 nomination, he changed all those positions.

So liberals decided they liked him when he supported liberal positions, and decided they didn’t like him when he didn’t support those positions. Thats hardly irrational or hypocritical.

35

Tell that to Al Gore.

Had Nader not been on the ticket Gore would certainly have won that election.

Yeah, Nader had nowhere near enough votes to ever get elected but he definitely played the spoiler for Gore.

Have the recently elected republicans to congress been doing a lot of what they said they would do?

As for the White House are you saying it is then correct for the left to vote Obama out of office or are they supposed to stick by him?

Republicans have always been more monolithic and in lockstep with each other. They are a much more homogenous group. Democrats have a much bigger tent. It is a lot harder to keep everyone happy so someone on the left is always squawking. This is nothing new.

Obama clearly provided that spark in the last election. This is not some idealized fantasy land. It has happened. While not easy it could happen again.

Politics may be the art of compromise. It is also talking softly and carrying a big stick. Sometimes heads need to be knocked. Sometimes a principled stand is desirable over compromise. Certainly not on all things but I imagine even you have some principles you would not be willing to compromise on. When those are in danger you go to the mat for it.

I do not think Obama has ever seen something he won’t compromise on. Hell, he compromised to republicans over taxes even before compromises were being talked about. I am not fond of a president who practices that kind of negotiating strategy.

36

How are you going to get progressives elected in conservative districts? You can’t. And so how are progressives better off when conservative districts elect conservative Republicans rather than conservative Democrats?

You’re never going to get a “progressive majority” when you don’t even have a progressive plurality within the Democratic party. If there’s anyone who gets purged out of the Democratic party it will be the progressives rather than the moderates.

37

I don’t think he lost a lot of SDMB votes over it, but I do think it changed the way people felt about him. And he did manage to lose the center in the election.

That’s exactly why you won’t see a lot of people voting for a liberal third-party candidate.

38

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
Tell that to Al Gore.
[/QUOTE]

You tell him. I already knew about it, as I saw the effect of Perot on the Bush/Clinton battle. :wink:

Definitely…and I think that most lefties would have preferred the outcome. Which is sort of my point.

Yep…Nader never had any chance at all. Zero. But I should think that most lefties would have preferred Gore to Bush II. Even if Gore wouldn’t have pushed through whatever left wing agenda that lefties THOUGHT Nader would (I tend to think that, having gotten elected Nader would have hit that reality wall, where his preconceptions and positions shattered against the hard wall of reality in US politics), he would have been closer to what they wanted than Bush was (though, for full disclosure, I didn’t vote for Gore OR Bush..or Nader for that matter. I voted for the Libertarian candidate that year).

The ability to compromise is essential in an effective president of the US. The only people who don’t have to compromise are those who either have no power, or who have power but don’t have any real interest in getting any of their agenda through, or those who have absolute power. I think his ability to compromise and yet get so much of his platform through is one of his great strengths, and one of the reasons I’ll most likely vote for him again. Like I said, YMMV, and you are certainly free to vote for the equivalent of Nader in 2012…or not vote at all. I think that most of the 'doper lefties are smart enough to see that Obama is really the only viable choice, and even if they are unhappy with him they will vote for him anyway, rather than face the alternative. But then, I think that most 'doper lefties are a bit smarter and certainly more sane than many of the free range lefties wandering about in the US…

-XT

39

I think you misunderstood. Instead of trying to contest elections in conservative districts with a conservative Democrat, they should (temporarily) concede those districts than aim for a ‘Democratic’ majority that does not support the progressive agenda. And that has been the fastest growing caucus in the party. And they are better off being a cohesive minority that part of a false majority. They were elected in 2008 with hope that their agenda would be advanced, but divisions within the party failed it from occurring more than the Republican minority. If they are going to fail, it’s better to do so as the minority partner, than as the majority.

A Democratic Congress is worthless for a Democratic President if they can’t pass legislation for him (or her) to sign. They may as well sit in the minority and blame obstructionism on their opponents, then be forced to admit they are cause (which they were.)

40

Absolutely.

Compromise is essential.

That does not mean you do not fight hard while horse trading.

It also doen’t mean there aren’t some things very important to you that you do not stand strong on (e.g. the senators running away from Wisconsin…they were a minority but happy to stay and deal with it till something came along they simply could not abide). Those things should be few and far between but they exist.

Obama would compromise on health care, give in to republican demands and then they’d still give him the finger and not vote for it.

Compromise requires two sides willing to do it and when the republicans were overtly obstructionist Obama kept caving anyway. If you and I are trying to come to an accord and your answer is perpetually, “Fuck off” then eventually I think, “Fine, fuck you too.” :wink: