Watching Obama’s cabinet appointments, it’d be tempting to ask “wow – with an overwhelming mandate like they had, why are they not going straight for the end zone, rather than suddenly and visibly racing for the center?”<\/p>\n
The answer, of course – they didn’t have a sweeping mandate.\u00a0 It was a clear victory, all right, but McCain (thanks largely, I think, to Sarah Palin bringing out a base that’d been sitting on its hands since February) actually got about as many votes as Bush did in 2004; he’d have beaten Kerry.\u00a0 Obama swept into office on millions of new voters – and as Minnesota Third, Sixth and Senate races showed, his coattails weren’t especially sturdy; people apparently voted for Obama and nothing but the Obama.<\/p>\n
So how does <\/em>the left feel about this?<\/p>\n Charlie Quimby:<\/a><\/p>\n I’m not one of those who thought an Obama presidency would be the First Coming for the American Left, so I’m not going to indulge in much hand wringing over whether he has or hasn’t deviated from campaign promises. Anyone who can’t read reality between the lines of a campaign speech deserves whatever disappoint they feel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For someone who follows politics, that just makes sense.\u00a0 It crosses party lines; Ronald Reagan disappointed social conservatives by restricting his anti-abortion agenda to preaching from the bully pulpit, among many ecumenical examples; anyone who watches politics knows to be a little cynical or accepting of pragmatism, however you want to call it.<\/p>\n But among the less jaded, is it possible to catalog the extent to which Obama has been oversold -indeed, the extent to which Obama oversold himself?\u00a0 The light worker<\/a>, bringing enlightenment to the benighted; the messiah<\/a>; the guy who’s going to solve your problems<\/a>\u00a0 by holding up his end of a quid pro quo that started when they went to the polls and put him in office.<\/p>\n How accepting are they <\/em>going to be when he doesn’t levitate and make the flowers bloom in January?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Watching Obama’s cabinet appointments, it’d be tempting to ask “wow – with an overwhelming mandate like they had, why are they not going straight for the end zone, rather than suddenly and visibly racing for the center?” The answer, of course – they didn’t have a sweeping mandate.\u00a0 It was a clear victory, all right, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}