Obama Hostility Syndrome

I guess “Obama Hostility Syndrome” applies to the far left as well as the far right. It is a condition whereby fault is found with anything and everything Obama does.

Short memories and impatience rule the day for so called “progressives”, who give little credit to Obama for the work he has done for women’s right to choose and right to equal pay, defense of stem cell research, and the right of gays to serve in the military, and would presumably prefer no progress at all to progress they consider insufficiently robust. The reality of a supermajority requirement in the Senate is invisible to them. Obama is apparently supposed to draw lines in the sand, stamp feet, and the Republicans will then quake in their boots and start supporting progressive legislation. They seem to forget we were losing 700,000 jobs per month and GDP was falling at a 6% clip when Obama took office, but now unemployment is unacceptably high, and it’s Obama’s fault, as if a second spending bill would somehow make it through Congress if Obama only demanded it. There seems to be amnesia about the saving of the auto industry and hundreds of thousands of jobs with it.

The weak healthcare and Wall Street reform bills barely squeaked by. Stronger bills would not have made it through the Senate at all. Obama’s foreign policy has been almost exactly as promised. Our standing in the world has been largely restored. Candidate Obama promised to not pursue prosecution of the Bush administration because he considered it counterproductive. Please stop complaining about it. Yes, he put some conservatives in his cabinet; he promised to do that, too. Anyone who thought Obama was a fire-breathing lefty just wasn’t paying attention. Progressives were instrumental in helping Obama get elected, for sure, but so were moderates, independents, and Republican converts. Obama’s responsibility is, ostensibly, to all Americans, but even his constituency – those that voted him into office are, overall, decidedly moderate.

Given stiff opposition and vitriol from both the left and the right, Obama has been surprisingly effective, signing into law more substantive legislation in his first two years than any president in forty years.

So get over it. We have an election to win, a Senate majority to preserve, and a House to take back.