Blaming the progressives is certainly not new . I just find the timing very disconcerting. Shouldn't they have  held their fire until after the election. I also find their condesension counter productive I tend to feel they treat us more like Rethuglicans then progressives. There is real anger in the hearts of this entire Administration  from Obama on down toward its base. The President was poorly served by Rahmbo who I believe convinced him to ignore his base and then attack and Blame them for their own present dilemma. As they say "The right fears it's base and the left hates theirs".

looks like I'll be supporting the other reasonably progressive Democratic President that we have right now.

Absolutely right, or "spot on."  And for Jerome to title a post "Whiners" at this point is too much.  To see him apparently delight in the struggles of Dems in this election year raises more questions, political and psychological, than I can even attempt to address.  Instead I suggest MyDD readers move on.

This is disgusting, and it sickens me. Americans don't like whining from their Presidents.

I read excerpts from this interview this morning, and was reminded of Jimmy Carter's malaise speech in 1978. Carter suggested that there was a "crisis of confidence", and that the problem was with the American people.

Two years later, Ronald Reagan re-defined the problem, and it wasn't the American people. He declared that there wasn't a crisis of confidence; there was a crisis of leadership. And that brings us to where we are today. Excuse my French, but Barack Obama couldn't lead a fart out of an asshole. He has no clue what leadership is all about.

I can recall Presidential candidates---Mike Dukakis in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996---who knew damned well that they were facing sure defeat. But in the interest of rallying the troops, they maintained a positive tone, kept their senses of humor, and campaigned non-stop right up until election day. That's what leaders do.

Goodbye, Barack Obama. I'm sure you'll make a very fine law professor somewhere.

Seriously.

I wonder if he'd do it.  Or Howard Dean.  Or Michael Moore.  It has to be someone who wouldn't be afraid of being tarred as a bad team player by the "liberal" media and the Democratic establishment.

Just once I want a Democrat in the White House who doesn't play defense all the f*ing time.

Thought maybe people would enjoy reading more than the single, short paragraph with which we are seeing all the outrage over...since it was a 7 page long interview.

-----------

ROLLING STONE: You've passed more progressive legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson. Yet your base does not seem nearly as fired up as the opposition, and you don't seem to be getting the credit for those legislative victories. There was talk that you were going to mobilize your grass-roots volunteers and use them to pressure Congress, but you decided for whatever reason not to involve the public directly and not to force a filibuster on issues like health care. What do you say to those people who have developed a sense of frustration — your base — who feel that you need to fight harder?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: That's a bunch of different questions, so let me see if I can kind of knock them out one by one.

One of the healthy things about the Democratic Party is that it is diverse and opinionated. We have big arguments within the party because we got a big tent, and that tent grew during my election and in the midterm election previously. So making everybody happy within the Democratic Party is always going to be tough.

Some of it, also, has to do with — and I joke about it — that there's a turn of mind among Democrats and progressives where a lot of times we see the glass as half-empty. It's like, "Well, gosh, we've got this historic health care legislation that we've been trying to get for 100 years, but it didn't have every bell and whistle that we wanted right now, so let's focus on what we didn't get instead of what we got." That self-critical element of the progressive mind is probably a healthy thing, but it can also be debilitating.

When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, "Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable." I came in and had to prevent a Great Depression, restore the financial system so that it functions, and manage two wars. In the midst of all that, I ended one of those wars, at least in terms of combat operations. We passed historic health care legislation, historic financial regulatory reform and a huge number of legislative victories that people don't even notice. We wrestled away billions of dollars of profit that were going to the banks and middlemen through the student-loan program, and now we have tens of billions of dollars that are going directly to students to help them pay for college. We expanded national service more than we ever have before.

The Recovery Act alone represented the largest investment in research and development in our history, the largest investment in infrastructure since Dwight Eisenhower, the largest investment in education — and that was combined, by the way, with the kind of education reform that we hadn't seen in this country in 30 years — and the largest investment in clean energy in our history.

You look at all this, and you say, "Folks, that's what you elected me to do." I keep in my pocket a checklist of the promises I made during the campaign, and here I am, halfway through my first term, and we've probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we said we were going to do — and by the way, I've got two years left to finish the rest of the list, at minimum. So I think that it is very important for Democrats to take pride in what we've accomplished.

All that has taken place against a backdrop in which, because of the financial crisis, we've seen an increase in poverty, and an increase in unemployment, and people's wages and incomes have stagnated. So it's not surprising that a lot of folks out there don't feel like these victories have had an impact. What is also true is our two biggest pieces of legislation, health care and financial regulatory reform, won't take effect right away, so ordinary folks won't see the impact of a lot of these things for another couple of years. It is very important for progressives to understand that just on the domestic side, we've accomplished a huge amount.

When you look at what we've been able to do internationally — resetting our relations with Russia and potentially having a new START treaty by the end of the year, reinvigorating the Middle East peace talks, ending the combat mission in Iraq, promoting a G-20 structure that has drained away a lot of the sense of north versus south, east versus west, so that now the whole world looks to America for leadership, and changing world opinion in terms of how we operate on issues like human rights and torture around the world — all those things have had an impact as well.

What is true, and this is part of what can frustrate folks, is that over the past 20 months, we made a series of decisions that were focused on governance, and sometimes there was a conflict between governance and politics. So there were some areas where we could have picked a fight with Republicans that might have gotten our base feeling good, but would have resulted in us not getting legislation done.

I could have had a knock-down, drag-out fight on the public option that might have energized you and The Huffington Post, and we would not have health care legislation now. I could have taken certain positions on aspects of the financial regulatory bill, where we got 90 percent of what we set out to get, and I could have held out for that last 10 percent, and we wouldn't have a bill. You've got to make a set of decisions in terms of "What are we trying to do here? Are we trying to just keep everybody ginned up for the next election, or at some point do you try to win elections because you're actually trying to govern?" I made a decision early on in my presidency that if I had an opportunity to do things that would make a difference for years to come, I'm going to go ahead and take it.

I just made the announcement about Elizabeth Warren setting up our Consumer Finance Protection Bureau out in the Rose Garden, right before you came in. Here's an agency that has the potential to save consumers billions of dollars over the next 20 to 30 years — simple stuff like making sure that folks don't jack up your credit cards without you knowing about it, making sure that mortgage companies don't steer you to higher-rate mortgages because they're getting a kickback, making sure that payday loans aren't preying on poor people in ways that these folks don't understand. And you know what? That's what we say we stand for as progressives. If we can't take pleasure and satisfaction in concretely helping middle-class families and working-class families save money, get a college education, get health care — if that's not what we're about, then we shouldn't be in the business of politics. Then we're no better than the other side, because all we're thinking about is whether or not we're in power.

Obama just seems so out of touch with the electorate these days. For someone who was so good at campaigning in 2008 and who had the pulse of the voters so well, he now seems clueless. He attacks his base while ignoring the repeated assaults by the Republicans against him and his administration. He suggests that had he campaigned hard for the public option, he would have gotten no legislation passed; clearly, he didn't understand the legislative process, failed to connect to the importance of supporting his base and his campaign promises, and repeatedly believed he would eventually get brownie points for trying over and over again to coddle up to Republicans with that bipartisan-thingie. In all of these cases, he misread the public, his opposition, and his responsibilities to his base and party. As things now stand, I would vote for any -- ANY -- Democrat who would run against him in 2012. I fear there won't be one, so we'll be stuck with him for the election, and if by some weird stroke of luck he gets re-elected, we'll be stuck with him another four years after that. So sad. Such promise! Promise now wasted with his denials of reality and his continuing drive to find a bipartisan means of governance, even in the face of near total opposition and obstruction by the Republican party. Why can't he see that? Everyone else groks it, yet he remains aloof and oblivious that his accomplishments are minimal and not what he promised us. Change we can believe in is not incremental, marginal change that more resembles the status quo than real change. But that is what we got, and now he wants us to shut up and get with the program while he continues to mollycoddle the Republicans for change no one recognizes. Just simply sad!

Whiners?

The truth hurts sometimes, dowsn't it Jerome?

I think it might something.  

I still think it is a great site, I enjoy coming here and reading the posts, even the ones I disagree with, and I like the links to all the great articles etc., but I think the drop off in posts may tell us something.

I agree with Biden that it a small small ... very small part of the base.    I also agree that some of it is flat out whining (like not getting a public option when the votes were not there).   

I didn't see a lot of whining or sitting on hands in WI last night.   The President gave a great speech and the large crowd seem very connected and fired up.   They didn't look like they were very concerned with what someone like a Huffington or a poster on MyDD has to say. 

A microphone makes someones voice seem powerful even when it is not.   I think what you are seeing a handful of people with a microphone .. a blog .. making noise and having that noise amplified.

During the '06 and the '08 elections this site had a lot more diaries being written, and it had a heck of a lot more responses.   But since it seems that a majority of what is posted is critical of Obama ( and in my opinion often unfairly so), I wonder if a lot of people are just tuning out because they don't want to hear it.   I wonder if anyone of those 1000s of attendees in WI last night cheering the President used to come here and post and now don't want to because of the negativity.

As for any 3rd party talk I will say what I always say.   If that is what someone wants to do, after what we saw in 2000, they should go start making their Nader signs now but don't come back and don't ever bitch that the Democrats are not going enough to stop the Republicans that THEY helped elect.  

This diary expresses, more eloquently - but with no substantive difference - the same viewpoint as Ed Rollins, the Chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/09/29/rollins.democrats.voters/index.html?hpt=T2

The biggest whiner I know in politics just called his political base (actually Obama's political base) a "bunch of whiners!" How many times over the years have we watched Joe Biden on television badmouthing someone or something? I've yelled at the television set, "Quit whining, you whiner!"

 

 

ROFL

Obama didn't ATTACK his base.

He called out a very small group of people on the far left.

The media doesn't get it and the Whiners don't like it. 

Now the whiners are using their platforms to try and suggest to the rest of us that we are all being attacked.   That is not true.

Let the whiners whine but don't lump me in with them, I want nothing to do with them.

Obama's problem isn't that he is a weak whiney guy and people are waking up to it.

Obama's problem is that he has a weak whiney block of voters who all want different contradictory things.

That one group of democrats is actively planning to try and shoot down a candidate from their own party all the while not realizing that they are the party's problem is amazing.

Obama's progressives are Carter's liberals with an identity crisis.

The clinton faction wouldn't have been wimpy like this.  That is true old school blue collar while kicking your ass democratic party.

Pick your party.  Reality based Clinton wing with a pro business while maintaining an eye for social justice but not at the expense of the greater good management style or the Carter/Obama I know better than you super liberal can't get anything done everyone suffers especially the poor management?

I will stand with those who actually grew the economy lifting so many out of poverty and making us the envy of the world.  Not an incompetent neoliberal and the progressives that thrust him upon us.