Obama's Problem

I've been saying basically the same thing for awhile now. In a nutshell, there are no magic wands.

A brief and pretty decent article from The New Republic...

[O]ne of the Democrats’ election-year problems is certainly avoidable: The party’s base is morbidly depressed, despite having a president with the most effective progressive record in more than four decades. Indeed, at some point you have to wonder if it is possible to satisfy liberals at all. Let’s tally up the postwar record. Obama—liberal disappointment. Bill Clinton? Even worse. (Disillusionment with the Clinton years sparked Ralph Nader’s decisive third-party challenge in 2000.) Jimmy Carter? Also a liberal disappointment, inspiring both a liberal primary challenge from Ted Kennedy and a general-election challenge by liberal John Anderson...

...The cycle of disappointment suggests that perhaps the problem here is not the Democratic presidents, flawed though they may be, but their delicate supporters. Liberals tend to imagine progress occurring in a blaze of populist glory, but almost inevitably it requires grubby compromises with powerful and unseemly interests. Medicare, Social Security—they were all half-measures that involved a devil’s bargain. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger identified the “doughface” progressive tendency as a discomfort with the realities and compromises of governing. “Politics becomes, not a means of getting things done,” he wrote, “but an outlet for private grievances and frustrations.”