Change is tough. So liberals can't just leave it to Obama

Change is tough. So liberals can't just leave it to Obama

For euphoria to give way to disillusionment is premature. Instead, supporters should battle for his healthcare bill

Michael Tomasky

I must report to you that the mood is somewhat grim these days among American liberals. Some feel President Obama has already sold them out. Others are angrier at conservatives and their deliberate lies about aspects of healthcare reform. But even many in this latter cohort think the White House hasn't been pushing back against the lies hard enough. Either way, expectations are diminished – nerves are fraying, temples are greying.

What a change from just six to nine months ago. During that period, from the wake of Barack Obama's victory through the first 100 days, liberal optimism was higher than it's been in this country for 40 years. One could believe, on a good day, not only that America would pass healthcare reform and climate change bills (that'd be the easy part), but that Israelis and Palestinians and Iranians and Syrians and Indians and Pakistanis and North Koreans and you-name-it just might all wake up one day and text one another: you know, Obama's win suddenly makes us aware of how silly we've been all these years. Let's grow up and make peace.

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If Obama serves two terms, we are a mere 8% of the way into his tenure. That strikes me as a little early for people to be throwing in the towel. So the interesting question of the near future will be: can the Obama movement go from the euphoric phase, in which everything seemed possible, into a more realist phase in which people come to terms with the very difficult and far less exhilarating tasks associated with governing, and the often dissatisfying victories that result from the legislative process?

Liberals in my country tend to have a deeply romantic view of political movements. When we think of the civil rights movement, we think of the highlights, the stirring moments. Memory tricks us, and the media, which speak in such shorthand, help perpetuate the trick. So we tend to think that Rosa Parks sat on a bus, Martin Luther King gave some great speeches, decent Americans recoiled at racist violence on the nightly news, and boom, change happened. The reality was that nine long years passed from Parks's act of civil disobedience until Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill – nine years of often mundane and inglorious work. And even then, the civil rights bill didn't really fix the problem of African Americans being denied the vote, so Congress had to go back the next year and pass the voting rights act.

Ditto with Franklin Roosevelt, to whom Obama is often unflatteringly compared. FDR, the comparers say, fought the right tooth and nail, took no prisoners and was unapologetically liberal, even leftwing by today's standards. Many very important points are left out of this comparison. Roosevelt made lots of mistakes – the bill he'd intended as the landmark legislation of his first year, the national industrial recovery act, was an abysmal failure, eventually struck down as unconstitutional by the supreme court. Unlike Obama, he didn't have to worry about Senate filibusters, which weren't really invoked in those days but which are a constant threat today. And while the right wing he faced was real, it wasn't nearly as well-financed and orchestrated as today's version, which even has its own national disinformation "news" network.

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