Did Barack Obama run as a "progressive" or as a "moderate"?

[kentuck]

Does it make any difference?

Would you not have voted for him if he called himself one or the other?

I don't understand these posts that talk about the small percentage of progressives that are in the Party and have no real power. Are they saying they would not vote for a progressive if he/she were the candidate? Are progressives saying they would not vote for a moderate if he/she were the candidate? I think that is a false argument. Most progressives will vote for the Democrat, even if he is a moderate and most moderates will vote for the Democrat even if he is a progressive. I would bet that most moderates that voted for Obama the last time thought he was probably a progressive when they cast their vote?

Some progressives are angry at Obama because they thought we needed real change in the last election. They thought we would be just where we are if we did not change the direction that George W Bush took this country. Some moderates do not seem to think it was such a big deal. They did not put the same value on change that progressives wanted. They see it as a simple choice between the Democrat vs the Republican. Or perhaps they agree with most of the decisions the President has made since he has been in office? They disagree with the progressives' anger even if they agree with the progressive ideas. The only difference is that progressives would like to change the direction and the moderates do not. Or perhaps they think they can only change by getting more Democrats into the Congress? Then they would be happy with progressive change? These people confuse me. They seem to be one chromosome short of being a Republican?

In the end, no matter how liberal or progressive the candidate, most of these moderates will vote for the Democrat regardless if he is a moderate or a progressive.

[Harmony Blue]

1. Based on the 2010 mid terms apathy apparently not

Furthermore, there is no guarantee the I's will vote for Obama this time around, so the apathetic trance the Democratic base is in must be broken.

[XemaSab]

2. Considering that the dude's de facto campaign slogans were "hope" and "change"

and he's failed to bring it with either of them, I think we have a right to be pissed.

[Warren Stupidity]

8. slogans that were designed to be absolutely vague

so as to allow us to read into them whatever we thought that meant.

[kentuck]

10. Do you think progressives were naive...?

...to think there would have been more change, especially under the circumstances? A caretaker Administration is fruitless and more of a negative than a positive?

[Harmony Blue]

14. Fair question

I never bought into the vague slogans, and I always felt Obama was a center left Democrat. But, I never would have imagined that his administration would move to the center right. Independents did vote for him as a center left candidate, but abandoned him and Democrats in 2010, so they misread the political landscape. I don't think Obama should move to the extreme left, but back to the center left would be a start!

[Warren Stupidity]

17. I wasn't. I had very low expectations.

I vote Democratic because the other party is full of theocratic full out loons. I am not an enthusiastic voter.

[kentuck]

20. Can we ever hope to get the change we need?

By simply voting for the "D", instead of the principles behind the Party? Does that help matters or make them worse?

[Warren Stupidity]

32. I really have no idea. Theoretically we could transform the party.

The reality is that the oligarchs have the system pretty well locked down and they are quite capable of defeating/defusing any serious challenge.

Every time I start thinking about what could be I end up with this hypothetical:

A progressive insurgency movement within the Democratic Party takes control of the party and sweeps into power, capturing House, Senate, and Presidency. Sweeping reforms are initiated that threaten to finally break the stranglehold of the plutocracy on the federal government.

Question: how long is this government allowed to stay in power?

I guess I'd like to find out the answer.

[Recursion]

25. There was a lot of projection, IMO; he ran on bipartisanship

Which means, you know, doing a lot of things the other party likes. I think a lot of the left heard "bipartisanship" to mean "persuading Republicans to accept progressive policies", which wasn't what he meant and isn't going to happen any time soon.

Look, we have a lot of people in this country who feel about government the way most of us here feel about corporations. And even the ones who don't like corporations feel (accurately, IMO) that the reason most of them are so powerful is because of the government. Unless voters start electing progressive Congresspeople like they did for FDR and LBJ, we aren't going to get sweeping FDR/LBJ-style expansion of government. It's probably going to take a generation, and we're going to have to do the kind of grunt work starting in city councils and school boards that the right has been doing for 30 years.

[alc]

45. yes, progressives were naive (and moderates too)

If Obama had been questioned more by by his supporters, he may have realized that he needed to put together a very different cabinet who could help in the areas he was weak. The most important thing any executive can do is delegate well. I think Obama's biggest weakness has been not having the right set of people to delegate to. He has the ideas, and can make a great speech and get the people behind him - even those who don't necessarily agree with him. But he didn't surround himself with assistants to make his ideas happen. That led to him losing optimism, which led to not making the great speeches and rallying support.

There were quite a few valid questions about his qualification. They were initiated as attacks, so blown off as irrelevant by supporters. Some of the questions about experience really should have been taken more seriously by anyone who considered voting for Obama, not just by those attacking Obama. Leading the executive branch of the US government is probably the biggest single executive job in the world. Republicans immediately attacked the "community organizer" response. Democrats had an almost Pavlovian response to defend against the attack because Republicans use the term in a derogatory way. It was very proper to defend the title as an admirable profession/job. But we could also have asked if it was really qualification for President of the US (actually those of us who liked Hilary did ask for more and were attacked)

In addition to being the top executive, add the responsibilities of working with the legislature to move changes through congress. You also need someone with either significant DC experience or who will put together a cabinet with the experience. There probably was something to the "voted present" and "hadn't sponsored any significant legislation" attacks.

Experience does matter and thinking that ideas and charisma could overcome that was naive.

[PurityOfEssence]

49. Even though you're not asking me, I say "yes, they were naive"

Not only were they naive, many were downright arrogant and combative if anyone dared suggest that he may be simply a cipher or the ultramoderate corporatist that his long legislative record suggested.

These "circumstances" that everyone bellyaches about are tiresome. Yes, the world's economy damn near crashed, but that's what guaranteed him the election; Carville was right: he won the election on September 16th. Although that's a huge issue, he came into office with a HUGE groundswell of backlash against the reactionaries, a landslide election and comfortable margins in both Houses of Congress. Any Republican would have taken that as a mandate to repeal the Renaissance and take us back to the Dark Ages; look what Junior did after losing the popular vote by over a half of a million votes.

This is not a caretaker administration; this is an appeasement administration. It is more important to be some supernatural transcendent leader who bridges the divide between the parties--even if done by abject surrender of principle--than it is to keep some checks in place on big money. It's a self-aggrandizement operation writ large. A caretaker administration would keep things stable, not run roughshod over the left and drag the country ever more to the right.

Have you ever seen a President throw it away with both hands like this? Johnson with Vietnam is the only parallel I can think of, but I give him lots of credit for being a truly progressive social reformer.

Naive would have been one thing, but we were bullied and cajoled into swallowing the PR and keeping quiet about the mistaken tactics.

[JVS]

23. Vague though they may be, getting people fired up for hope and change and then offering them...

austerity is the kind of fucking over that can cost a politician in the long run.

[Motown_Johnny]

3. he looked progressive after 8 years of da Shrub but he ran as a moderate

Even Rachel Maddow said that he had achieved ~85% of what he said he would do in his first term, in the first half of his first term.

(near the end of this video)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#4077

[kentuck]

5. Did he have to be a progressive to stop the Bush policies?

Or could a moderate have done it as well? The Bush policies were not moderate or progressive - they were wrong. That's the bottom line.

[Motown_Johnny]

26. My point exactly, he was a moderate

but by comparison he looked progressive

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. When he announced, in his campaign, that he would escalate the war in Afghanistan..

I didn't care what he called himself. It was a deal breaker.

[banned from Kos]

6. He ran as a practical liberal - not a progressive

I dislike his Afghan escalation and War on Drugs but I knew beforehand and support him 100% today.

[Warren Stupidity]

7. He ran as a center-right democrat to anyone paying attention.

And he rather quickly dropped most of the stuff that was not part of his role as the 'caretaker/cleanup administration' after another debauched republican orgy of tax cuts and deficits.

So I am not angry with Obama for betraying campaign promises, I am disgusted with another center-right bullshit democratic administration that does nothing to change course from the neoliberal nightmare.

[OHdem10]

9. He never committed. He was a Vessel and he permitted his followers

to fill it up as they dreamed.

[kentuck]

11. Moderates knew that and progressives did not?

Progressives were naive to think there would have been real change. Or perhaps moderates think there has been "real change"? This seems to be the dividing point.

[Marr]

30. Democratic "moderates" come in a couple of flavors.

They're either Republicans who take the liberal side of a few social wedge issues, or they follow personalities and don't care about policy all that much. Both of those groups have every reason to be content with Obama's performance.

[Little Star]

24. +1

[MannyGoldstein]

12. Can we agree that he ran on Democratic principles, and

Then discarded these principles like they were rotting dead fish once elected?

[kentuck]

15. I don't know that we could all agree on that...

But most progressives might believe that to be true. So is the anger justified? Moderates would say no.

[MannyGoldstein]

48. For example, Obama did not run on cutting Social Security, yet

That is what he's been trying to do.

I believe that every Democrat has a right to be furious at that.

[BzaDem]

16. What principles are you talking about? The vote for FISA? His proposal to escalate in Afghanistan?

His relentless rhetoric about bipartisanship and finding common ground with Republicans (even in the primary)?

[Shagbark Hickory]

13. He did his best to appeal to the entire spectrum of voters. The bottom line is there

are numerous things that can be done to stimulate the economy and create jobs coming from both sides of the aisle. But all attempts to do this seems to have been abandoned.

We cut taxes to mil/billionaires. That didn't work. We signed free trade agreements, that didn't work. We bailed out the banks and GM. That didn't work.
There's lots of ideas coming from the left and the far left but it's too much work apparently to get any of that done.

[upi402]

18. not so - I never voted for Clinton or Gore

I'm an instance of not voting for Democrats when they are corporatist. I voted for Obama because I bought into his BS. Not this time. I'll go back to Independents, Greens, whatever

- I wont throw my vote away and support the absence of a true opposition party again.

[BzaDem]

19. He campaigned as a moderate, and the main reason many thought otherwise was that he wasn't Hillary.

Obama didn't just campaign as a moderate in the general election -- he even campaigned that way in the primary. To a certain extent, he ran well to the right of Hillary. Obama kept saying that Democrats needed to compromise, find common ground, work for bipartisanship, etc. It was repeated so often that Hillary started mocking it. Hillary's position was that we generally can't work with these people, because they are unreasonable.

Yet some progressives really didn't like Hillary (presumably associating her with the Clinton era), and thought that Obama must be more to the left.

[kentuck]

22. I think you are right but...

many progressives thought Hillary would be like Bill - a conservative Democrat. After all, she was once a Nixon girl.

[BzaDem]

37. Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. That was indeed the reason why many opposed Hillary.

I'm just saying the leap in logic that was unwarranted was assuming that anyone who wasn't Hillary would have been more liberal than Hillary. This leap was particularly unwarranted when the person in question (Obama) was literally running in the primary for more bipartisanship, more compromise, more common ground.

[kentuck]

51. I think some may have thought...

that he was running as a moderate and would govern as a progressive, or at least, more left?

[ProgressiveProfessor]

21. Neither he ran as the non-Clinton and on his skin color

His statements and slogans were vague at best.

[JoePhilly]

27. Pragmatic Democrats knew exactly who Obama was ... I sure did ...

And he's been doing pretty much exactly what he said he'd do, or that he'd try to do.

And as for being right where we were under Bush, that's in correct.

Pragmatics fully understood that it would take many years to undo everything Bush did in 8, and even longer to fix the damage done since Reagan. Obama said this over and over as a candidate, and since.

But for some, Obama had 1 year to fix it all, if they gave him that long. The screaming started almost immediately and has remained at about the same level ever since.

[kentuck]

29. I think the screaming started when...

he pushed the Bob Dole and Mitt Romney health reform instead of going for a public option or single payer. That was seen as a surrender by many Democrats.

[JoePhilly]

35. I've heard that before ...

First, he never ran on single payer. Never came close to promising that.

Second ... on the argument that he didn't fight enough on the public option, let's discuss that.

There would probably have been enough votes in the Democratic House for it, so we can set them aside.

The Senate was a different story. The GOP was never going to vote for that, never. And the Dems had 5-6 blue dogs who would not support it. So, to get the PO, Obama has to flip those 5 or 6.

So let's pretend that some how, he gets all but ONE of them ... the only one left is Lieberman.

Joe "Senator from Aetna" Lieberman.

You are now the President, flip Joe. Explain how you get just that one. When you explain how, make sure to recall that:

1) Lieberman campaigned against Obama (you) in the GE, and supported McCain.
2) Lieberman does not plan to run again. At the end of his term, he's cashing in his chips.

The reality is that Obama got as much as he could get.

And I would suggest that if Obama got NOTHING ... the same folks who attack him for not getting the PO, would simply be doing the same thing because he didn't get anything at all.

[Marr]

31. The problem is not that he's moving too slowly. It's that he' s moving in the wrong direction. n/t

[Harmony Blue]

40. That sums it up

It doesn't matter where Obama started at, but it does matter where he ends up.

[quiller4]

61. Thank you, Joe. Your comments are spot on. n/t

[edhopper]

28. I thought he was a liberal to moderate Democrat

not a moderate Republican. Which is how he has acted.

[GreenArrow]

33. He ran as "hope" and "change"

As to your last sentence, you can ask George McGovern, Walter Mondale or Mike Dukakis about that.

[kentuck]

34. There is such a thing as charisma and the ability to inspire...

in regards to getting voters to support you. I do not agree with putting any of the above in the same category as Barack Obama.

[GreenArrow]

42. I guess the point was

that Obama was able to inspire both moderates and progressives to vote for him, but at the end of the day, he's niether of those appellations; rather, he's a custodian for the status quo.

I compared those other candidate with Obama because when push came to shove, moderates abandoned the Democratic nominee in order to vote for the Republican. At least Obama has the advantage of running as an incumbent rather than a challenger. Personally, if the election were held today, I would not vote for him. I'll vote third party, or simply sit things out. If he is, as several posters have suggested, the "best we've got" -- and he likely is -- then that's a big part of the country's problem right there. He still has time to do, or better, BE something genuine, but more likely he'll continue to act in James Kuntsler's words, as either a hostage or a stooge.

[pipi_k]

36. Not sure what...

label I'd assign myself on the scale, although I think I'm somewhat closer to Moderate than Progressive, but anyway, I don't care if the Democratic candidate is Moderate or Progressive. I'll vote for him/her because s/he is a Democrat running on Democratic values, in general. I don't vote for someone based on just one issue.

That's it.

[LWolf]

38. He ran as a moderate, but governs further to the right.

Too many voters took his vague but inspiring words about hope and change and projected their own hopes for the kind of change they wanted to see on him, without looking at the fine print or reading between the lines.

I wasn't one of them, but even I am shocked at how much further to the right he governs than I thought he would, and I always saw him as center-right.

I think I'll abstain from answering questions about my vote. Will many disenchanted people still vote for him? Probably. Will he lose votes he had in '08? Without a doubt. Will he lose enough to make a difference? I think so.

[GreenArrow]

43. I voted for him, tepidly,

largely because the country needed to repudiate 8 years of Bush, and given the sorry state of our racist history, I believed it would be good for the country to elect him. Having Palin on the opposing ticket didn't hurt either. I certainly didn't vote for him because of his policy statements. Given the way he ran, I'd "hoped" it was all for show, and that he'd govern further to the left once he got elected. Boy, was I wrong. Unless he undergoes some sort of road to Damascus conversion (probably a dangerous analogy, given the state of affairs in Syria)he's not likely to see my vote again.

[elocs]

39. Obama ran on however people chose to see him...progressives as a progressive,

moderates as a moderate. And all got caught up in the excitement of the historical campaign.

[loyalsister]

41. Change?

I wonder if there is a difference in perception of what that means?
From my observations, it seems like some assumed "change" would be instantaneous like a revolution.
Others see it as a step by step process.
Seems like that may drive the variation of the current support of Obama

I think we mostly have the same goals but disagree on the means and how fast we should get there.

[grahamhgreen]

44. He did NOT run as a Republican, which is whose policies he's implementing.

[PurityOfEssence]

46. Both; it depends on which audience you were at the particular time

He ran on the vague rosiness of his personal character and the willingness to let dewy-eyed people place all their dreams with him.

[Rex]

47. Well, I knew he was a corporate suit long before he was POTUS.

But the words in 2008 that came out of his mouth were those of a progressive...not that I expected him to actually DO things that were progressive and he has not.

[WinkyDink]

50. A Democrat?

[Zorra]

52. Are you gonna believe what he said, or what you see? nt

[kentuck]

53. Change delayed is change denied...

Just as "justice delayed is justice denied".

We needed change. We wanted change. We had an opportunity for change. It didn't happen. And it was bad for us and the country that it did not happen.

[Stinky The Clown]

54. He ran as a typical politician

It was all about him.

[Name removed]

55. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[kath]

56. Well, he ran as a "Democrat" - and that he ain't - anyone who wants to undo the New Deal is NOT a

Democrat - period.

[moksha]

57. He ran largely on vaugness and 'not-bushness'.

The rest was up to the individual voters to fill in what they perceived. This is why, in my opinion, many on the right feared him so badly, and still do. Also, why many on the left are disappointed and why others are still very pleased with his performance.

He is much better known, now. His style, approach and image are no longer vague, even if some of his positions still are. He will have a harder time being the everything to everyone candidate in 2012, and he will be running on his record.

[NoodleyAppendage]

58. CHANGE. HOPE. Etc. Those are NOT moderate terms.

Obama may have always been a moderate, but his 2008 campaign was anything but. His catch phrases and promises during the campaign gave everyone the impression that he was the new FDR. This is EXACTLY why the liberal grassroots feel cheated, dumped upon and generally disinclined to vote for him in 2012.

J

[GreenArrow]

63. No, those are human terms,

and people of all stripes read into them what they will. As GWB once said, in a moment of semi-lucidity:

"Let me start off by saying that in 2000 I said, 'Vote for me. I'm an agent of change.' In 2004, I said, 'I'm not interested in change --I want to continue as president.' Every candidate has got to say 'change.' That's what the American people expect."

[shanti]

59. well....

after 8 years of shrub, americans were going to vote for a dem no matter what his stripe. unfortunately, it turned out to bite us in the ass. :(

[kentuck]

60. If enough people feel like you...

then the President will have a difficult time getting re-elected. He will try to throw the "base" a bone before the election hoping to regain their loyalty, in my opinion.

[kentuck]

62. Is it possible..?

that Barack Obama formed his political philosophy during his college years, when Ronald Reagan was President? He has shown some fondness for Ronald Reagan, as I recall? He also has shown a fondness for taxcuts to revive this economy.

[GreenArrow]

64. He's post-partisan, remember?

Which, to a certain degree, also indicates post-ideological. The business of America is business, and he's takin' care of business. literally.

[kath]

65. So I guess being post-partisan means that it's okay (at least to him) to run as a Democrat even when

you don't believe in core Democratic principles and just loooooove Republicans and their bullshit economic "principles" and love the corporations and bankster assholes?
:banghead: :banghead: