Obama and His Discontents

[KoKo]

July 27, 2011
Obama and His Discontents
By TA-NEHISI COATES

The administration of President Obama has never held much regard for its left flank. Admonished by the vice president to “stop whining,” inveighed against by the president himself for “griping and groaning,” the liberal critics have been generally viewed by the White House as petulant children. “The Professional Left,” former press secretary Robert Gibbs dubbed them, a gang of nettlesome romantics who “ought to be drug-tested,” and would not be happy until “we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.”

Keeping up the theme, the administration recently released a video of Mr. Obama waxing scornfully at the expense of his softheaded allies. The audience was an ideological cross-section of college students, no doubt picked to emphasize Mr. Obama’s ever open mind. The president invoked Abraham Lincoln, noting that the Emancipation Proclamation was a compromise that freed only the slaves in rebel territory. “Can you imagine how The Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, ‘Lincoln sells out slaves.’ ”

Rendering the hallowed Proclamation as a seminal act of hippy-punching is understandably attractive to the Very Serious People of Washington. But, in Mr. Obama’s case, it also evinces a narrow politicocentric view of democracy that holds that the first duty of a loyal opposition is to stay on message and fall in line.

In fact, many of Lincoln’s most vociferous critics welcomed the Proclamation. Wendell Phillips, who once derided Lincoln as “the slave-hound of Illinois,” claimed the Proclamation as “the people’s triumph.” Frederick Douglass, who helped wage a primary campaign against the president in 1864 and once charged that Lincoln was “a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred,” hailed the Proclamation as “the greatest event of our nation’s history.”



More of article at.........

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/opinion/28coates.html?_r=3&pagewanted=print

[madfloridian]

1. Yep count me one of the "the ill-tempered gripers and groaners out in the street."

"Obama has been much praised for the magnanimity he shows his opposition. But such empathy, unburdened by actual expectations, comes easy. More challenging is the work of coping with those who have the disagreeable habit of taking the president, and his talk of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” seriously. In that business, Obama would do well to understand that while democracy depends on intelligent compromise, it also depends on the ill-tempered gripers and groaners out in the street. "

Yes, it does.

[ProSense]

2. Oh, this is good

<...>

In sum, it’s true that the Proclamation was a compromise. But hailing it merely as such is akin to hailing “Moby-Dick” for being a book — technically correct, if painfully thickwitted.

Likewise, a pedantic focus on the document itself conveniently omits the work of abolitionists and radicals whose tactics, encompassing jailbreaks, treason and shootouts, far outstripped anything ever concocted by MoveOn.org. But Lincoln understood their relationship to the larger cause. “They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally,” he once said of the Radicals. “They are utterly lawless — the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with — but after all their faces are set Zionward.”

Obama, too, stands atop the work of a coalition of unhandy devils. In the fall of 2002, Chicago’s own professional left organized a rally to oppose the Iraq War and invited Mr. Obama to join them. He accepted, and the first unwitting steps to the White House were taken. It is considerably harder to imagine Mr. Obama’s path through the Democratic primary had he been just another pro-war Democrat insisting that the base activists stop whining.

Mr. Obama, of course, is not an activist but a politician held accountable by a broad national electorate. He is thus charged with the admittedly difficult task of nudging the country forward, even as he reflects it. That mission necessitates appreciating the art of compromise, but not fetishizing it. Mr. Obama need only look to his hero for an object lesson. Parcel to emancipation, Abraham Lincoln, against the howls of radicals and black leaders, pushed for the colonization of blacks in Africa or the Caribbean, as middle ground between full equality and slavery. The scheme ended in embarrassment; Lincoln’s point man was exposed as a con artist who attempted to effectively re-enslave the blacks he was charged with leading. A Congressional investigation soon followed. It was a fiasco — and it was a compromise.

<...>

Compare Gibbs' "Professional Left" comment, which was not Obama's, to Lincoln's actual characterization.

Still, given that the President meets with progressive bloggers and organizations, it's likely he understands their importance.

The one thing Lincoln has that Obama doesn't have is a real, active and effective progressive movement.

[Bluenorthwest]

5. Pro, there is no comparison, because Lincoln was speaking of

actually lawless people acting for abolition. John Brown. Guns. Treason, jail breaks. There is no current parallel to the groups Lincoln was talking about. Lincoln's 'characterization' of lawless people as lawless was accurate.
So tell me in what ways the 'professional left' is engaging in shootouts and jailbreaks and other acts of violent rebellion? Lincoln was being accurate about serious matters, Gibbs was being glib about his own petty concerns. Compare those two things.

[Bake]

3. I thought I was pretty much moderately liberal

But I guess I'm part of the "professional left" which the WH holds in such disdain.

Because I'm a Democrat who believes in historic Democratic ideals. Like Social Security. Medicare. Peace. Actually taking care of Americans.

Sigh.

Bake

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

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

[RC]

6. I read that as

Obama and His Disconnects.

He should not have:
Extended Bush's tax cuts.
Expanded Bush's wars.
Filled his Cabinet with Right Wingers.
Abandoned his campaign promises.

[CakeGrrl]

7. A couple of GLARING misconceptions from this:

If one goes to the "Professional Left" link within this article, a couple of things stand out:

1. The "ought to be drug-tested" quote by Gibbs was specifically in reference to those who said Obama was no different than Bush - that's a major difference from being a broad-brush swipe at progressives. After all, didn't some of those who continue to be pissed off about that comment defend Jane Hamsher's reference to SOME of Obama's strongest supporters being "the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet", saying that she didn't mean ALL of them? Where's the consistency?

2. Gibbs' general "Professional Left" reference IN CONTEXT:

Gibbs said the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.

Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington “in America,” and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.



I'll continue to make this distinction even though some are relying on this misconception as the basis of their righteous anger.

[KoKo]

8. So Gibbs says the only people they listen to is the Rich Donor Progressive Left

because the "other folks out there" who gave "nickles and dimes" are no longer important?

I can't understand why you support the RICH/Banking, Hedge Fund Community who were the BULK of BOTH Obama and McCain's Donors and trash the little people. Or, maybe it's more that I'm amazed you aren't willing to stand up for those Thousands of Little Donors who thought they were elected "The Man of the People" and that he might be a new "JFK" who would bring back HOPE AND PROMISE TO AMERICAN DREAM...

There's some disconnect between what both of us see as very different....:shrug:

[CakeGrrl]

12. Misinformed is misinformed. Why base a premise on willful ignorance?

How do you get that I am supporting the rich against the 'little people'?

I'm saying don't deliberately misinterpret something to stand on principle under false pretense - before this Presidency, it was easier to attribute that to Bush followers.

As for those who think they were bamboozled, they shouldn't have put their starry blinders on. Believe it or not, if one actually paid attention to what Obama said during the campaign, actually took him at his word, they wouldn't be disillusioned.

Projecting a fantasy image onto a President, particularly at these unprecedented times, is setting one's self up for disappointment. But that's not the President's fault. This country is in bad shape and anyone who thinks it will just take a couple of years to make it all better is not thinking realistically IMO.

[Whisp]

9. +a trillion

[killbotfactory]

10. The NYT, making mountains out of molehills to sow dischord between the left

and the most powerful elected official standing in the way of the GOP agenda.

Nicely done.

[ClarkUSA]

11. "Coates’s father was a former Black Panther who raised seven children by four mothers"

"My dad was my strong black male role model. He was Hercules. He was Zeus. He was mythical." ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

"Written in a beat style, influenced by hip-hop and Dungeons and Dragons, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s voice is difficult and comic."

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_11_013677.php

Coates' voice sure is "comic." Just the person I want telling me what President Obama thinks. :sarcasm: