The straw that broke the liberal's back?

By Nicholas Wilbur

A band of liberal revolutionaries is storming the Capitol, hip-checking elderly Tea Party activists and snatching the anti-Obama protest signs right from their arthritic hands. They're chanting, screaming, wailing – "Traitor," "Vile Betrayer," "No-bama, No-bama..." – and tearing the cloth from their breasts in agony as they fall to their knees, pound the earth with clenched fists, and curse the gods of progressivism for the posturing con artist occupying the White House. American flags burn in the background. Hope and Change T-shirts burn in the foreground. Blue flames crisscross like daggers in the sky as the ominous clouds form like cyclones above the White House. The governors who have gathered with Obama inside the State Dining Room are all smiles and nods as the president explains his openness to the idea of letting individual states create their own health-care laws in lieu of the ever-unpopular "ObamaCare" legislation, while everyone outside hoists pitchforks and decries the unraveling of populism, not as they know it, but as they imagine it.

When I saw the headline from The Hill, "Obama backtracks on health mandate, wants to allow earlier opt-out," this was the fantasy my conscious mind created as it envisioned the reaction of the news from left-wing diehards, bleeding hearts, and feverish bloggers.

The already fine line between fantasy and political reality draws paper thin the more time President Obama spends in the White House. The details don't matter to the extremists on the left who envisioned Obama during the campaign as a messiah of modern American leadership. Politics today is less about policy than it is about perceptions, and the president's admission that his health-care law could be altered or amended if such adjustments helped the country implement across-the-board reforms serves only to ignite the flames of doubt and fuel the fires of intra-party betrayal in the eyes of uncompromising liberals.

He's already guilty of compromise, negotiation and capitulation – the trifecta of evil that is embodied, historically, by those whose souls are either sold to the powerful deal-makers within Washington or bought by the corporate lobbyists without. We saw it first when he gave up on the single-payer health care option. We saw it a second time in his deal with Republicans to cut taxes for the rich. We're seeing it again with this appeal to bipartisanship over implementation of what is arguably the most historic piece of social legislation enacted in Congress since civil rights.

For the lefties who voted for, campaigned for, and prayed to their Wiccan goddesses for a progressive panacea to the Bush era, this may prove to be the straw that broke the liberal's back.

And yet it means nothing to the pragmatists who understand that consensus is key to any law and that popularity is paramount to any successful legislation.

Twenty-five governors – representing half the country – have filed suit against the series of reforms included in the 2010 legislation that conservatives refer to as "ObamaCare." Polls consistently show an equal division of opinion on whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is good or bad for America. And minds are still unmade as to whether repeal of "ObamaCare" is better than the health insurance company abuses that plagued the country before such protections were put in place.

If it is disappointing to a certain faction of the American public that Obama has decided to continue his efforts to improve the law that will most likely define his presidency, then that in itself is disappointing. It is, after all, the liberal class in America that boasts of top placement on the intellectual hierarchy of the political – and social – ladder. They should be the first not only to understand but to appropriately analyze the limitations of bureaucracy, the stalwart opposition to change, and the restraints of progressivism. They are not only its advocates but its victims.

The president's abandonment of the single-payer option nearly split the Democratic Party in two, even if it was consistent with his campaign promise to lead by consensus, not with an iron fist. His capitulation on tax cuts nearly severed his ties not only to liberals but to fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, and he accepted that blowback as a consequence of his suddenly treasonous promise to reach out, whenever possible, to his opponents in Washington. It's worth mentioning that all of his alleged "capitulations" polled well for him, as the general public seemed to appreciate that a national leader tried to unite the country with a willingness to compromise rather than to divide the country by refusing to listen to the opposition.

It seems not every Democrat in America is liberal. (Somewhere in the world, a bird of idealism dropped dead from surprise.) 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)