Left revokes Obama's liberal card
Now many liberals feel sure: Barack Obama was not the one they'd been waiting for.
The man who won the presidency in part due to his opposition to the Iraq War was suddenly leading a charge to use military force against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. The Republican refusal to go along was to be expected. The liberal backlash, though, was particularly intense.
That came on top of the fears that the president will, for all the current tough rhetoric, again go into the fall political fights about the budget and debt ceiling starting from a position of over-concession.
The White House says he's still a proud progressive. And, of course, he'll always be a socialist to the Republican base. To prominent liberals, though, Obama's center-left, sure. But he's no liberal.
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They applaud a lot of what Obama's done, which the White House says is clear proof of a man who has stayed true to progressive principles. The federal health care system that spent decades as a Democratic dream will be reality Oct. 1, and there's never been a president with anything close to Obama's record on gay and broader civil rights. He got the troops out of Iraq, and he rolled back some of the Bush tax cuts.
But even on these, liberals have long seen a president who has fallen short, cutting deals - like never pushing for single-payer health insurance. Or championing the more modest Dodd-Frank banking reforms instead of a renewed Glass-Steagall Act. They say those moves diluted what they're supposed to stand for, and what they used to think he stood for.
"I don't think that anyone at this point would characterize the president as the progressive warrior that the progressive movement is anxious to see," said Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who claimed victory after the new diplomatic efforts that started as he and other Hill liberals resisted the Syria authorization.
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Blame Congress, economic reality and resistant Republicans for much of the disappointment.
"The president was the embodiment of the dreams and aspirations of a better country and better future," said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), recalling the feeling in the crowd at Obama's inauguration. "To some extent the person that he's not is a person that he ultimately could never be."
But Syria, coming off of a summer of rolling National Security Agency snooping revelations, is all Obama.
Reliable liberal Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) were among those who even now remain undecided on authorization. That's because, according to former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean - there's no sense in trying to apply 1960s labels to the situation facing the president in 2013.
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Dean says the fact that Obama is consisdered a liberal leader is proof of just how far from the actual left the left has gotten.
Obama's a liberal "not by the old definitions, but by the new definition he is," said Dean, who supported the Syria strike under the sense that military intervention to stop chemical weapons attacks fits snugly within the larger liberal philosophy of fighting for the expansion of rights.
Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said Obama's the one responsible for the confusion over what liberal politics means, arguing he's effectively poisoned the movement by seeming to support it, while actively betraying it.
"House Democratic leaders are content to let the president set the agenda on foreign policy, national security, privacy, the economy, health care, Social Security and workers' rights," Kucinich said. "Since the administration has lacked coherency on such a wide range of policies, and since it has wrongly been perceived as liberal from its inception, it has successfully usurped any legitimate liberal agenda."
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