Though the Obama administration says its emergency steps pulled the country back from the brink of a depression and saved jobs, the current 10.2 percent unemployment rate is being blamed on Obama and the Democrats, further eroding their political strength.
Challenges Ahead
So what can Obama do?
The President might want to learn something from a scene in the movie "Bull Durham when the minor-league manager shakes up his "lollygagging baseball team by confronting the players in the shower and hurling bats at their feet.
Obama must grasp that more lollygagging on health-care reform won't help. He has little choice but to pressure the Senate to take up the health bill right away. In doing so, he would need to show some anger and engage in serious arm-twisting. Inspirational speeches only get you so far with Congress.
If Senate Majority Leader Reid can't muster the 60 votes to stop a Republican filibuster, then Reid must turn to alternatives, like passing as much of the bill as he can under the majority-rules provisions of "reconciliation.
Clearing away the long and dragged-out health-care battle would open the legislative calendar to deal with other pressing concerns, such as financial regulation and unemployment, as well as the environment and global warming.
In all these matters, Obama must find a far more assertive " and more populist " voice than he has shown to date. So far, he appears to have made a calculation that his only hope is to finesse the jaded and right-leaning Washington Establishment, rather than to confront it.
Yet the problem is not just Obama or even the Democrats.
While many on the Left decry Obama for his wimpy behavior and denounce congressional Democrats as sell-outs, the American progressives also must look in the mirror. The truth is that the political/media crisis facing the United States is systemic, and progressives share in the blame.
Over the past three decades, the American progressives have largely forsaken the need to build national media institutions and think tanks, ceding that strategic ground to the neocons and the Right. That misjudgment, in turn, has left national politicians (and mainstream journalists) vulnerable to pressure from well-funded right-wing attack groups.
The Left's response usually is to sit in the stands and shout complaints -- or to veer off into unrealistic strategies, like supporting third parties "to teach the Democrats a lesson, as happened in 2000 when supporters of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader claimed they couldn't detect "a dime's worth of difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
The Left's institutional weaknesses in this "war of ideas have left many progressives pinning their hopes on some knight-in-shining-armor politician who rides off to slay all the dragons. However, this unrealistic concept invariably disappoints. When the knight-politician falls short or cuts deals, the progressives are left muttering about betrayal.
The other way to go would be for progressives to commit serious resources, time and talent to build media institutions and think tanks (especially near the front lines of Washington, rather than on the West Coast).
These institutions would engage in a daily conversation with the American people about what the facts are and what can be done, while also creating defensive shields for national politicians and journalists when they actually do the right thing.
Arguably, the biggest problem with the health-care debate has been the Left's lack of a reliable message machine to counter the Right's predictable denunciations of "big government. That "government is the problem theme has worked since the days of Ronald Reagan in large part because the American people haven't heard a consistent counter-argument.
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