From dKos: Unsubscribed from Organizing for America, Moved to Tears

by Eric Stetson

I watched some of President Obama's comments in his press conference today, one day after I sent him a letter in response to an Organizing for America email, expressing my disappointment in some of his policies and his proposal to extend all of the Bush tax cuts.

Today I saw a president openly mocking and disparaging the principled activists of his party. He sounded like he didn't want my support or the support of any progressives -- that he is done with us and plans to make no attempt to woo us by embracing any of our principles and policy preferences as he has done so frequently and self-abasedly with conservative Republicans. He sounded like he would not even try to "earn back my support and the support of the millions of progressive Democrats, especially young people like myself who invested so much hope in your candidacy two years ago," as I asked him to do in my letter.

Then, this evening, I got another email from OFA, asking me to watch a video of President Obama promoting the Republican tax cuts for the rich and to leave a comment as feedback to the Obama campaign. I watched the video and left the following comment:



And then I clicked the link to unsubscribe from the Organizing for America email list. I didn't do it lightly. I have thought of doing it before, but never actually did it. Maybe it was my memory of the weekends I spent walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors, passing out literature and attempting to persuade people to vote for this man in the crucial swing state of Virginia. I was always hoping that at some point, President Obama would surprise me by restoring the hope I had invested in him in his campaign. There is such a deliberate finality about taking the action of unsubscribing from the mailing list of an organization that one used to support strongly and in which one made a significant investment. Finally I did it.

I felt a sick feeling in my stomach and found tears welling up in my eyes. I don't cry easily. I certainly didn't expect that the simple act of unsubscribing from a political mailing list would have such an effect on me, but somehow it did.

I think my tears came because of a realization that suddenly hit me full force like a punch in the gut: that Barack Obama will go down in history as a tragic figure, a classic, archetypal example of a man who had so much potential to be a great, transformational leader at a time when the society in which he lived desperately needed such a leader and actually elected him to lead our country in a new direction. And who took the rare opportunity given to him and threw it away, becoming just another typical politician making backroom deals for less than half a loaf -- mere crumbs, in fact, and crumbs spiked with poison -- becoming an accessory to the continued decline of American civilization, shattering the hopes of millions. When he could have been so much more.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/12/8/926787/-Unsubscribed-from-Organizing-for-America,-Moved-to-Tears


And I don't think Obama gets it.

You are by no means alone in your lamentations.

Cheers!

just disgusted. But your post is moving. I had forgotten that he once was a sign of hope. I had forgotten election night and how we felt when we woke up the next morning.
Thanks for your post.

is not helpful. Obama will only be as great as those of us willing to fight along side him in these battles. I believe he is acting as a means of overcoming not only the obstruction of the GOP, but those Dems in Congress who have nothing to advance a progressive agenda.

He is a collaborationist. Look at his cabinet. He has no intention of fighting. He's a neoliberal freemarket champion.

n/t

Not a bad man, just a coward who would rather bend to tyranny than oppose it for what is right and honorable.

I can't take a President Palin, I really can't....and it would not just be me in the end, it would be everyone paying for putting someone actually dumber than Shrub in the White House next.

We're at no lack for potential Churchills, prior and after the war he was a man scorned and disgraced as utterly out-of-line with the objectives and agenda of his party, specifically and especially on account of his religious conservatism, bellicosity and trenchant racism. He was, however, much like The Dude, the man for his time and place.

But all English determinism aside, Churchill would have been for naught without a De Gaulle as leader of the Free French to stand up and explicitly declare Petain and Laval illegitimate and traitors to France. A De Gaulle to serve as shadow leader from exile. Where is De Gaulle? What prominent Democratic leader would stand up to declare this President and his governance illegitimate and out-of-line with Democratic ideals, necessary to be opposed to the last? To do so is to launch a Democratic Party civil war and to risk a Palin presidency. (I expect there to be no possibility of a Palin presidency regardless, but to pick that fight is to risk being the goat of all Democratic political history if one fails.)

The OP is so lucid, I don't know how anyone can remain the least bit unclear about why his base is deserting him

Feel like a Japanese soldier on Guam in 1990.

that Mr. Stetson and others here at DU are expressing. I hate seeing it. I don't like to be wrong...but this time I wish I had been. I wish that Obama HAD been all the things many of you saw in him...
And I agree with you...I don't think the POTUS gets it. :(

As you point out he has made it crystal clear that he is the one that dosen't want to work beside us. In fact he pretty much admits he has every intention of working against us no matter what we say to him or do for him. He thinks we are "purists" standing in the way of his great destiny.

He made his deal now he can go ask the Pukes to stand beside him because I won't. I'd say the old adage when you lie down with dogs you wake up with fleas, but I don't want to insult the poor innocent puppies of this word by comparing them to the PUKES.

I expect many across the country are doing the same. It should be a wake-up call, but Obama will probably choose to sleep through it.

He will find funding for his campaign elsewhere and he still has plenty of enablers left. If he looses the next election he will just go on a speaking tour, write his memoirs. He and his family will never have to worry about how they will make ends meet, not like the majority of the rest of us.

I am going to go and do that. I wonder if a large wave of unsubs will get their attention. I suspect not because they do not seem to get what it is that their former supporters want and need at all.

Thanks for posting this.

"extending tax cuts for the rich"

Obama talks about "compromise."

Fine. Where's our compromise?

What's he doing that he doesn't want to do just to keep US happy?

I don't see any compromise in our direction.