It’s never enough to get elected. Sometimes politicians think that’s the hard part. The campaign is so long, so all-consuming, so much a world in itself that a winning candidate always has the tendency to think that he can govern as well and as meaningfully as he campaigned, particularly when President Barack Obama took office. This is almost never true.
Liberal dissatisfaction with Obama has reached fever pitch of late. A July Gallup poll found that 30 percent of self-identified liberals did not approve of his job performance.
Liberal icons like Princeton professor Cornel West have expressed disappointment in his performance, and ambivalence about his reelection. There are even mutterings about a primary challenge — two words that have historically meant severe trouble for incumbents.
In many of its particulars, this liberal unrest mirrors the conservative mood.
The notion that conservatives are angry, bitter and dissatisfied is now taken for granted. Conservatives are often called unrealistic, and blamed for the stalemate that is politics.
However, the stereotype that liberals — if they are disappointed in what Obama has done with the politics he is stuck with — are just as cranky is ignored more often.
Consider what Obama has done since his election. He’s passed the Holy Grail of Democratic politics — health care reform. This accomplishment alone makes him the most consequential Democratic president since the New Deal. He’s passed a stimulus bill that checked off a lot of liberal wishlist items.
Certainly, he’s disappointed liberal expectations in his continuing prosecution of the war on terror, but he also ended "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," one of the left’s great grievances against the military.
If this presidency isn’t liberal enough in these turbulent times, then Democrats display a lack of realism akin to the Republicans who seem to be fervently waiting for Ronald Reagan to return from the shores of Avalon to rule for a thousand years.
It seems both sides of our national debate are angry and unrealistic. What does it mean for the 2012 election?
As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in Salon this summer, what made Obama’s 2008 campaign remarkable was the intensity of his voters’ support.
If his first term has indeed dampened this intensity, then the huge undertaking that is a presidential campaign will be even more colossal. Obama’s remaining true believers will experience a kind of fatigue as more and more is expected from a smaller group of donors and volunteers. The effect this can have on a campaign should not be ignored.
So the Democrats are in the unenviable position of defending a president they see as a disappointment. The Republicans are in the unenviable position of watching many flawed contenders throttle each other for the right to look small next to a weakened president.
No wonder both sides are angry.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu
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