"Make me do it" is the most honest and important statement Obama ever made
Have a progressive agenda we want implemented? "Make me do it" is the presidential reply. That clearly applies to Obama, since he literally said it, but it also applies to every President we are likely to ever see elected in our lifetimes. It is a very long hard climb to reach the presidency and whoever gets there arrives accompanied by a truck load of I.O.U.s. We have a political system that is obscenely skewed by money, but even if money wasn't as disproportionately transcendent in American politics as it is, the presidency is an inherently conservative institution. The federal government, and the cumulative interests that it has served for generations, has tremendous inertia behind it to remain on track in whatever track it now is running on. And that by definition is the status quo, which always means that the people who are getting what they want from the current societal order always start out holding most of the strings.
The only time I half expected anything remotely resembling revolutionary changes flowing top down from the President to the people was during that brief shining moment when it looked like RFK would become the next President of the United States But those were extraordinary times and Bobby was an extraordinary person whose character was forged in fires during those extraordinary times. We don't know how much he could have accomplished, but even he would have needed to lean heavily on the support he knew he could summon from a breathtaking broad spectrum of socially engaged grass roots backers.
For every degree left of center that Barack Obama navigates he does so by breaking through thick political pack ice, and it always takes its toll, even when it ultimately shatters. It is true that some women, and some men, are made of steel more hardened than the norm, and they will confront some storms that others would shy away from, but they too ultimately have to pick their fights in order to be viable. Which is ultimately why I am not overly disheartened by the likelihood of a Hillary Clinton Democratic candidacy for President. In the end it is less about the candidate and more about us.
In the binary political world of American politics, where the cumulative forces of every national special interest conceivable places its chips on either black or red in each national election, the field of political combat starts off tightly confined. The lines are drawn just short of the extreme right on one side of the field, and narrowly left of center at the other. In that binary world, at the national level, our team is the one that will at least occasionally acknowledge the legitimacy of occupying any ground laying left of center. How hard they will fight for that ground is a different story. Pragmatic considerations usually pull toward the center of the well worn playing field with its inherent conservative bias, not to the center of an abstract political spectrum where actual socialism remains a theoretically valid option
The President we elect can venture outside traditionally defined boundaries, but only on rare occasions, and only when there is a strong groundswell of popular support pushing hard for that line to be crossed. The lines themselves are theoretically subject to change, but bringing about that type of change is much more formidable to accomplish than are isolated single transgressions across those boundaries. It is our continuing struggle and responsibility to move the lines, of what it is possible to achieve in the way of social justice in America. That initiative won't come from the man or woman we manage to elect as President in any given four year cycle. We will have to make him or her move toward us. We can't place all of our eggs in any presidential basket, no matter how inspirational on one hand, or disillusioning on the other, he or she may ultimately turn out to be.
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