Reply #42: He started his term with more support, more cheering crowds, [View All]

[ThomCat]

more of an opportunity to have HUGE populist masses backing him up on damned near everything than any other president in modern memory.

All of those crowds from campaign events, every one of those people were a political resource available uniquely to him. If he had been pushing policies and proposals that helped those people, motivated those people, and Most Importantly, Kept those people directly informed and personally involved...

1. Instead of being isolated in a bubble inside the beltway, he would have had his finger on the pulse of real people throughout America

2. He would have been at the head of a Populist Army that would make the Teabaggers look petty and minuscule by comparison, and he's be able to crush the Koch brothers in any head-on political endeavor by matching his group against their's

3. He would have had everyone else in the party coming to him begging him for a nomination, or for support, or for an introduction on a stage with populist crowds so that they could polish their own Populist Credentials.

4. Which means Obama could have been leading the entire party back to the left in real substantive ways, away from the toxic influences the republicans have had as they dragged politics constantly to the right for the past 30 years.

All it would have taken, is accepting that he was leading crowds of real people, and accepting that those people are a real political resource. Don't abandon them after the election as mere voters. Don't say goodbye to them, "We'll see you again at the next election. Oh, and Please give money."

No! Give some power to those people, in ways that even the republicans aren't pretending to do. Truly build a bottom-up representative movement within the part with that crowd of supporters he has showing up at every campaign event.

He had the people. He had the resources. He had the charisma. He certainly had the P.R. teams on hand to manage it all.

But instead he dismissed all the people from the crowds, dismissed even his progressive advisers, in fact Because they were progressive, dismissed everything that even felt like his campaign and brought in all new people. From Goldman Sachs. Some from the Republican Party. Some from Industries. Some were even former Lobbyists. Any pretense of being Progressive went out the window and the chance to use those crowds went with it...out the window.