The Case for Obama

     The charges are familiar: He's a compromiser who
     hasn't stood up to the GOP or Wall Street. But a
     look at his record reveals something even more
     startling -- a truly historic presidency

By  Tim Dickinson
Oct 13, 2010 1:15 PM EDT
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/220013
The following is an article from the October 28, 2010
issue of Rolling Stone.

For many progressives, the presidency of Barack Obama
has been deeply disappointing. To hear some prominent
lefties tell it, the New Jesus of the campaign trail
has morphed into the New Judas of the Oval Office. "He
loves to buckle," MSNBC host Cenk Uygur declared in a
July segment called "Losing the Left." "Obama's not
going to give us real change - he's going to give us
pocket change and hang a 'Mission Accomplished'
banner."

The catalog of perceived betrayals unfolds something
like this: The liberal lion who stirred Hope, vowed
Change and roared about "the fierce urgency of now" has
failed to stand up to Republican obstructionists,
coddled corporate interests and allowed top liberal
priorities - a public option for health insurance,
climate legislation, immigration reform and the union-
expanding "card check" - to fizzle without a fight. The
same politician who fired up the Democratic base by
opposing a "dumb war" has surged 50,000 troops into
Afghanistan - not to take the battle to Al Qaeda, but
to prop up the corrupt and incompetent regime of Hamid
Karzai. The prison at Guantánamo? Still open for
business nearly a year after it was to have been
shuttered. Uglier still: Obama has asserted the
authority to assassinate American terror suspects
abroad and has tried to block court challenges of that
authority by invoking "state secrets."

On the economic front, Obama has surrounded himself
with the same free marketeers who led Bill Clinton's
calamitous deregulation of big banks, restoring Wall
Street to obscene profits even as one American in seven
has been engulfed by a rising tide of poverty. Eric
Alterman of The Nation distilled the left's lament this
summer, arguing that Obama may have "fooled gullible
progressives into believing he was a left-liberal
partisan, when in fact he is much closer to a
conservative corporate shill." The cover of The Obama
Syndrome, a new jeremiad by the political commentator
Tariq Ali, even gives the progressive resentment a
lurid illustration: Obama's face is shown flaking away
like a cheap plaster mask to reveal the chuckling
visage of George W. Bush.

But such selective indictments - legitimate and
troubling in many of their particulars - grossly
distort the sweep of the 44th presidency. It's one
thing to call the president on his shit. It's quite
another to paint his entire presidency as shit - even
if Joe Biden and Robert Gibbs are losing their shit,
accusing you of being a "whining" member of the
"professional left."

From the outset, it was inevitable that Obama's
transcendent campaign would give way to an earthbound
presidency - one constrained by two wars, an economy in
free fall and an opposition party bent on obstruction
at any price. "Expectations were so sky-high for him
that they were impossible to fulfill," says
presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. "Obama's
partly to blame for this: People were expecting a
progressive revolution. What the president has
delivered instead is gritty, nuts-and-bolts, political
legislative work - and it's been rough."

During his campaign, skeptics warned that Barack Obama
was nothing but a "beautiful loser," a progressive
purist whose uncompromising idealism would derail his
program for change. But as president, Obama has proved
to be just the opposite - an ugly winner. Over and
over, he has shown himself willing to strike
unpalatable political bargains to secure progress, even
at the cost of alienating his core supporters. Single-
payer health care? For Obama, it was a nonstarter. The
public option? A praiseworthy bargaining chip in the
push for reform.

This bloodless, if effective, approach to governance
has created a perilous disconnect: By any rational
measure, Obama is the most accomplished and progressive
president in decades, yet the only Americans fired up
by the changes he has delivered are Republicans and Tea
Partiers hellbent on reversing them. Heading into the
November elections, Obama's approval ratings are mired
in the mid-40s, and polls reflect a stark enthusiasm
gap: Half of all Republicans are "very" excited about
voting this fall, compared to just a quarter of
Democrats. "Republicans have succeeded in making even
the president's victories look distasteful, messy - and
seem like bad policy steps or defeats," says Norman
Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American
Enterprise Institute. "Many on the left have expressed
nothing but anger, frustration and disappointment."

But if the passions of Obama's base have been deflated
by the compromises he made to secure historic gains
like the Recovery Act, health care reform and Wall
Street regulation, that gloom cannot obscure the
essential point: This president has delivered more
sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the
previous two Democratic administrations did in 12
years. "When you look at what will last in history,"
historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone,
"Obama has more notches on the presidential belt."

In fact, when the history of this administration is
written, Obama's opening act is likely to be judged as
more impressive than any president's - Democrat or
Republican - since the mid-1960s. "If you're looking at
the first-two-year legislative record," says Ornstein,
"you really don't have any rivals since Lyndon Johnson
- and that includes Ronald Reagan."

Less than halfway through his first term, Obama has
compiled a remarkable track record. As president, he
has rewritten America's social contract to make health
care accessible for all citizens. He has brought
100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-
unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush
administration's $3 trillion blunder in Iraq. He has
secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the
rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give
regulators powerful new tools to prevent another
collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved
all of this while moving boldly to ward off another
Great Depression and put the country back on a halting
path to recovery.

Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the
middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in
corporate welfare - reinvesting that money to make
college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He
single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three
automakers - saving more than 1 million jobs - and
brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal
regulation. Even in the face of congressional
intransigence on climate change, he has fought to
constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to
invest $200 billion in clean energy - an initiative
bigger than John F. Kennedy's moonshot and one that's
on track to double America's capacity to generate
renewable energy by the end of Obama's first term.

On the social front, he has improved pay parity for
women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians.
He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war,
reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine
while granting states wide latitude to experiment with
marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female
justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley
calls "an Obama imprint on the court for generations."

What's even more impressive about Obama's
accomplishments, historians say, is the fractious
political coalition he had to marshal to victory. "He
didn't have the majority that LBJ had," says Goodwin.
Indeed, Johnson could count on 68 Democratic senators
to pass Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act.
For his part, Franklin Roosevelt had the backing of 69
Senate Democrats when he passed Social Security in
1935. At its zenith, Obama's governing coalition in the
Senate comprised 57 Democrats, a socialist, a
Republican turncoat - and Joe Lieberman.

In his quest for progress, Obama has also had to
maneuver against an unrelenting head wind from the
"Party of No" and its billionaire backers. "Obama is
harassed as well as opposed," says Princeton historian
Sean Wilentz. "The crazy Republican right is now
unfettered. You've got a Senate with no adult
leadership. And Obama's up against Rupert Murdoch, Dick
Armey, the Koch brothers and the rest of the
professional right." Compared to the opposition faced
by the most transformative Democratic presidents, adds
Wilentz, "it's a wholly different scale."

Despite such obstacles, Obama has succeeded in forging
a progressive legacy that, anchored by health care
reform, puts him "into the same conversation with FDR
and LBJ," says Brinkley, "though those two accomplished
more." Goodwin, herself a former Johnson aide, likens
the thrust of Obama's social agenda to LBJ's historic
package of measures known as the Great Society. "What
is comparable," she says, "is the idea of using
government to expand social and economic justice.
That's what the health care bill is about. That's what
Obama tried to do with the financial reforms. That's
what he's doing with education. The Great Society was
about using the collective energies of the nation to
make life better for more people - and that's what
Obama has tried to do."

The historic progress that Obama has made is evident in
eight key areas:

1 | Averting a Depression

Any discussion of Barack Obama's performance as
president starts - and frequently ends - with one
number: 9.6 percent. That brutal, stagnant unemployment
figure cries out "failure."

But contemplate for a moment the abyss that Obama's
leadership steered us away from - where we would be
today if laissez-faire Republican radicals had
succeeded in allowing the economic collapse to take its
course. According to a study by economists from
Princeton and Moody's, more than 16 million jobs would
have been lost without the interventions of TARP, the
Recovery Act and the Federal Reserve - double the
damage actually suffered. Unemployment would have
spiked to 16.5 percent, and next year's federal deficit
would have more than doubled, to $2.6 trillion. "With
outright deflation in prices and wages," the study
concludes, "this dark scenario constitutes a 1930s-like
depression."

Obama played a pivotal role in the economic
interventions that staved off disaster. He renominated
Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve, backing
the central bank's use of record-low interest rates to
prop up the banking system. He demanded unprecedented
transparency of both the Fed and Wall Street in
administering "stress tests" that restored the
confidence of panicked investors, allowing "zombie
banks" to return to the living without resorting to
nationalization. Thanks to such stewardship, the
Treasury now estimates, the price tag for the TARP
bailout has dropped from $700 billion (the equivalent
of the Pentagon's annual budget) to $29 billion (about
one-fourth the spending on veterans). Above all, the
president drove the passage of the Recovery Act, which
the Princeton-Moody's study concludes has created
nearly 2.7 million jobs.

"The stimulus did what it was supposed to do," says
Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody's and a
former adviser to John McCain. "It ended the Great
Recession and it jump-started a recovery."

Republican critics have blasted the Recovery Act as a
failure because it did not hold unemployment below
eight percent, as the president's economic advisers had
promised. And liberal economists accused Obama of
failing to fight hard enough to enact a bigger stimulus
that would have saved more jobs. But since the original
stimulus squeaked through, the president has won a
series of stand-alone measures - including three
extensions of unemployment benefits, the Cash for
Clunkers program, a second round of aid for states and
a package of loans and tax cuts for small businesses -
that have infused another $170 billion into the
economy. The Recovery Act itself, meanwhile, has grown
from $787 billion to $814 billion, thanks to provisions
that were smartly pegged to metrics like unemployment.

In fact, should Obama secure passage of two new
programs he has proposed - $50 billion in
infrastructure spending and $200 billion in tax breaks
for investments in new equipment - he will have
surpassed the $1 trillion stimulus that many liberal
economists believed from the beginning was necessary.
"As the need became more obvious to people, we were
able to take additional steps to accelerate progress,"
Obama senior adviser David Axelrod tells Rolling Stone.
The president, in effect, has achieved through patience
and pragmatism what he was unlikely to have won through
open political warfare.

Evaluation of the Recovery Act tends to be big-picture
and binary. Has the stimulus put us on the path to
recovery - yes or no? But the stimulus was far more
than macroeconomic medicine. As conceived by the White
House, the Recovery Act was not only intended to
address the economic catastrophe at hand, it was
simultaneously designed to make investments critical to
reviving the middle class and improving America's long-
term competitiveness.

"This wasn't a stimulus bill," says Van Jones, a senior
fellow at the Center for American Progress who served
as Obama's green-jobs czar. "A stimulus is what you do
when you think you've got a short, V-shaped problem in
the economy and you want to deliver a jolt to reset to
business as usual. A recovery program is what you need
when business as usual is no longer possible."

To the extent that Obama has attempted to brand his
presidential project in the way that FDR did with the
New Deal or LBJ did with his Great Society, he has
talked about a "New Foundation." And the Recovery Act
was designed to lay the cornerstones. The law included
the most progressive middle-class tax cut ever enacted
- delivering benefits to 95 percent of working
families. It invested $94 billion in clean energy and
$100 billion in education - unprecedented levels of
commitment in both areas. It also devoted $128 billion
to health care and $70 billion to mending America's
safety net - including direct cash payments to the
elderly, the disabled and impoverished parents, as well
as billions invested in low-income housing, food stamps
and child care.

"If you passed each of those as separate pieces of
legislation," says Ornstein, of the American Enterprise
Institute, "that in and of itself would make for a very
significant record of accomplishment." Seen through
this prism, the stimulus alone represents a strikingly
progressive presidential legacy - rivaling the biggest
reforms of the Clinton presidency. And it passed on
Obama's 24th day in office.

3 | Saving Detroit

The lefty caricature of Obama as a timorous corporate
lackey unwilling to take bold action on behalf of
average Americans bears little relation to the
president who made a $60 billion bet on the future of
the U.S. auto industry - and hit the jackpot.

From the start, the prospect of recycling TARP funds to
save GM and Chrysler from liquidation was wildly
unpopular - a fact that Obama's top political
counselors, warning against the intervention,
vigorously impressed upon him at the time. But if
action was politically risky, inaction was economically
intolerable: Had the administration allowed GM and
Chrysler to go under, it would have triggered a
collapse of parts suppliers and dealerships nationwide,
creating such collateral damage that even Ford would
likely have gone belly up. The collapse would also have
led to the loss of more than 1 million jobs, primarily
in the devastated economies of Michigan, Ohio and
Indiana, where unemployment is among the highest in the
country.

After pushing his team to lay out a plan that would not
simply bail out the auto industry with condition-free
cash, as Bush had done, but to use the government's
leverage over automakers to set them on a more
competitive course, Obama literally went for broke.
Despite cries of "socialism" and "Government Motors,"
the administration bought a 61 percent stake in GM,
ousted its chief executive, forced both bondholders and
UAW members to make concessions and steered the company
through bankruptcy in record time. Simultaneously, the
administration invested $8 billion in Chrysler - a
dowry, of sorts, to secure the company's shotgun
marriage to Italian automaker Fiat.

It's difficult to overstate how effective and efficient
the government's intervention has been. By risking $60
billion, Obama saved a third as many jobs as the entire
stimulus package, which cost 13 times more. In fact,
the auto industry has not only survived, it has roared
back to life. GM is profitable and preparing to go
public in an IPO that could allow the government to
recoup its investment. Ford is prospering, edging out
Japanese rivals for quality. Even Chrysler is expanding
its market share. "The bailout of the auto industry
protected against absolute devastation in the economies
of the Midwest," says Ornstein. "And it is now turning
out to be a huge financial boon for taxpayers."

4 | Reforming Health Care

Obama's crowning legislative achievement is health care
reform. And true to Joe Biden's pithy and profane
assessment, it's a Big Fucking Deal. "All progressives
since Theodore Roosevelt wanted it, all Democrats since
Harry Truman fought for it, and only Barack Obama got
it," says Brinkley. "This is his huge accomplishment."

Obama's $1 trillion reform is neither simple nor
elegant. But over the next decade, it will extend
health coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans - the
equivalent of New York and Illinois combined - by
expanding eligibility for Medicaid and subsidizing
insurance for low- and middle-income citizens. By the
end of this decade, 95 percent of Americans will have
health insurance.

The law also establishes a new bill of rights for
patients: Starting in 2014, insurance giants will be
banned from denying coverage based on pre-existing
conditions and from imposing annual caps on benefit
payouts. Other rights have already kicked in. As of
September, insurance companies can no longer
arbitrarily revoke coverage for those who get sick.
Children with existing illnesses can no longer be
denied insurance. Younger Americans can stay on their
parents' policies until they're 26. And 1 million
elderly citizens are receiving checks for $250 to fill
the gap in Medicare's coverage of prescription drugs.
Most striking of all, the law accomplishes all this
while extending the solvency of Medicare by a dozen
years and cutting the deficit by $143 billion over the
next decade.

Historians give Obama high marks for finding a way to
push through health care reform even after the surprise
election of Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's
former Senate seat in Massachusetts. "One of the most
extraordinary moments of this presidency was the
decision to go for broke on health care after Scott
Brown," says Goodwin. "Instead of deciding to pull back
- we'll get half a loaf or whatever - Obama was willing
to take a risk at that point. They could have lost that
whole thing, and it would have been devastating for his
presidency. Somehow, even though we saw the ugly
process, it did work in the end."

With his victory on health care, Obama defeated the
anti-government Republicans who sought to destroy him
politically and created a program that will benefit
Americans for decades to come. But the victory cost him
dearly among some progressives - most prominently Jane
Hamsher, the activist ringleader of Firedoglake - who
continue to spit on the law for its lack of a
government-administered alternative to private
insurance. "Liberals and conservatives hate the health
care bill for the same reason," Hamsher tweeted. "It
sucks."

The administration remains unapologetic. "We couldn't
have gotten there with the public option," says
Axelrod. "The choice was between letting the thing fail
or taking a huge leap forward for everyone who will
benefit from this now and for generations to come. It
wasn't a hard choice to make."

5 | Cutting Corporate Welfare

The universal health care that Obama won may not
contain a public alternative to for-profit insurance,
but the president did succeed in dismantling a major
corporate gravy train. The health care bill is paid
for, in part, by cutting $136 billion paid out under
Medicare Advantage - a Bush-era boondoggle under which
private insurers were larded with subsidies for the
dubious service of inserting themselves as middlemen
between patients and government-run Medicare.

At the same time, Obama also used the health care bill
to end corporate welfare in an entirely different
arena: student lending. For decades, megabanks like
Sallie Mae have reaped billions by doing the paperwork
on loans to college students - even though Uncle Sam
sets the rates and assumes virtually all the risk. The
president's Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act,
which piggybacked to victory as an add-on to health
care, kicked private banks out of the federal lending
game. The unalloyed victory over corporate lobbyists
will cut lending costs by more than $60 billion over
the next decade - $36 billion of which is being
reinvested to expand federal grants for low-income and
middle-class students. The law also makes unprecedented
investments in historically black schools and community
colleges, caps student-loan repayment at 10 percent of
a borrower's income and pays for a program to forgive
the debts of students who make their careers in public
service.

"We've stopped this incredibly wasteful practice where
there was effectively no benefit for taxpayers, and we
were able to recycle that for families and students,"
says Rep. George Miller, who spearheaded the reform in
the House. "We've been fighting for this since the
Clinton administration - and Obama had the courage to
do it straight up."

6 | Restoring America's Reputation

Prescient opposition to the Iraq War was the fuel that
rocketed Barack Obama past Hillary Clinton in the
Democratic primaries. As president, Obama has stuck to
the timetable he laid out, withdrawing nearly 100,000
troops from Iraq - including the last combat brigade,
which came home in August. The move meant quietly
overruling his top general on the ground, Ray Odierno,
who wanted to delay withdrawal.

"Obama gets credit for checking off that box," says
Steven Clemons, director of American strategy at the
New America Foundation. "Bringing Iraq to a resolution
like this is a very big deal." Although 50,000 troops
remain - ostensibly in an advisory and training
capacity - they too have a date certain for withdrawal:
December 31st, 2011.

While Obama has yet to put an end to the fighting in
Afghanistan - a war that has now dragged on longer than
Vietnam - he has managed to boost America's standing in
the rest of the world. Despite the continuing loss of
NATO troops, U.S. approval ratings in western Europe
have soared into the 60s and 70s - far higher than
during the unilateralism of the Bush era. U.S. approval
is up more than 10 points in Poland and Russia, 20
points in China, and 30 points in Indonesia, France and
Germany. Overall, global confidence in America's
leadership has leaped from 21 percent in 2007 to 64
percent today.

The president himself has shown a deft diplomatic
touch: He has thawed icy relations with Russia and
negotiated historic cuts in nuclear arms, re-
establishing American leadership and credibility on
nuclear nonproliferation. He has also convinced
Security Council veto-holders Russia and China to back
new sanctions to punish Iran's nuclear ambitions - a
degree of international cooperation that was
unthinkable during the Bush years.

"President Obama has already repaired much of the
damage wrought during the eight years of the Bush
administration," former secretary of state Madeleine
Albright observed in September. "He has restored
America's reputation on the world stage."

7 | Protecting Consumers

Obama has taken heat from progressive critics - much of
it deserved - over the weakest aspects of his effort to
reform Wall Street. It remains unclear whether the new
law - the most sweeping overhaul of financial
regulations since the Great Depression - will do enough
to rein in high-risk trading and end the era of Too Big
to Fail. But the law does take bold steps to avoid a
repeat of the current meltdown. The Federal Reserve and
the FDIC now have the power to seize and dismantle
firms like AIG and Lehman Brothers and to force the
financial industry to pony up the costs of their
liquidation. Banks can no longer gamble federally
insured deposits on high-risk investments, and they are
required to risk a portion of their own assets in the
dubious investments they sell - a move designed to
prevent firms like Goldman Sachs from profiting off of
"shitty deals."

But the most significant facet of the legislation is
the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau. For the first time, a single regulatory
authority will have the power to protect consumers from
bad loans and credit deals, the same way the FDA
protects patients from dangerous drugs. Armed with an
annual budget of $500 million - exempt from
congressional cost- cutting - the agency will police
everything from payday loans to jumbo mortgages.

For a taste of the kind of regulations the consumer
bureau is likely to deliver, look no further than your
credit-card bill. Another measure pushed by Obama - the
Credit CARD Act - has already forced Visa, MasterCard
and American Express to include a box on your statement
spelling out how long it will take to pay off your debt
making only the minimum payment. It also bans credit-
card companies from jacking up your rate without
warning, and places stiff restrictions on luring
college kids into mountains of debt with easy credit.
Those are exactly the sort of reforms the new consumer
agency will have the authority to make on its own,
without an act of Congress.

The consumer bureau matters not simply to individual
borrowers but to the overall stability of the financial
system. "Predatory lending played a very big role in
the collapse of the financial system," says Joseph
Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. The
champion and acting head of the bureau, Elizabeth
Warren, put it even more bluntly to Rolling Stone
earlier this year: "Our financial crisis started one
lousy mortgage at a time, one family who got fooled,
tricked or cheated at a time," she said. "If nobody can
build mortgage-backed securities on trillions of
dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less
risk in the overall system."

8 | Launching a Clean-Energy MoonShot

Obama's failure to curb global warming by passing a
comprehensive climate bill stands as his most glaring
legislative defeat. But the absence of a cap on carbon
pollution has been offset in large part by the enormous
strides Obama has made toward a cleaner, lower-carbon
economy. With the Recovery Act, the president
effectively launched what greens have long agitated
for: an Apollo-like moonshot on clean energy.

Consider that the stimulus targeted $94 billion for
clean energy - making unprecedented investments in
everything from weatherizing federal buildings to
building solar thermal plants in the Mojave. Roughly
half of the money involves direct federal spending. But
the administration structured the other half - $46
billion - as matching funds and loan guarantees that
are realized only when the private sector steps up with
capital of its own. According to a report from the
president's Council of Economic Advisers, every dollar
of federal co-investment is attracting more than $2 in
private capital. Add it all up, and the Recovery Act is
driving more than $200 billion in public and private
investment in clean energy - $20 billion more than the
Apollo program would have cost in today's dollars.

"Everybody calls Obama the first black president," says
Jones, the former green-jobs czar. "But if you were
from Mars, and couldn't see race, you'd call him the
first green president. That's what distinguishes him on
a policy level from every preceding president: this
incredible commitment he's made to repowering America
in a clean way."

What is the country getting for this moonshot? The
investment is on track to double the nation's
renewable-energy generating capacity by 2012 - bringing
enough clean energy online to power New York around the
clock. It will also double the nation's manufacturing
capacity for wind turbines and solar panels, driving
down the cost of clean energy so it can compete with
fossil fuels - even if Congress doesn't pass a carbon
cap.

The president has also moved aggressively on other
fronts to reduce carbon pollution. Cash for Clunkers
retired nearly 700,000 gas guzzlers and replaced them
with cars that, on average, are 58 percent more fuel-
efficient. In the first-ever CO2 restrictions imposed
on cars and light trucks, automakers are now required
to boost fuel standards high enough to save nearly 2
billion barrels of oil and to reduce carbon emissions
by 21 percent over the next two decades. In January,
the EPA is expected to do what Congress refuses to: set
limits on carbon emissions for large industrial
polluters like coal plants and cement factories. And
the president has already put America's biggest
greenhouse polluter on a carbon diet: By executive
order, all federal agencies are now required to reduce
their carbon pollution by 28 percent in the next
decade. That act alone is enough to scrub 101 million
metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere - as much
climate-heating pollution as Ireland and Hungary
generate combined.

"We have running room to push this forward," says
Axelrod. "We can hit the targets we want to hit in
terms of reducing emissions, while hopefully spurring a
whole lot of economic activity around these new
technologies. We're going to keep pushing on that
door."

Taken together, Barack Obama's achievements are not
only historic in their sweep but unabashedly liberal.
By contrast, President Clinton's top legislative
victories - NAFTA and welfare reform - catered to the
right wing's faith in free markets and its loathing of
big government. "When you add them all together, it's
clear that Obama's accomplishments have been
underrated," says Brinkley. "Saving the auto industry,
health care, getting out of Iraq - these are big things
for the progressive movement."

But as effective as Obama has been at implementing
progressive policy, he has been lousy at capitalizing
on those victories politically. Much of his activist
base can't seem to get over the compromises he made to
win such historic reforms, and average Americans are
largely clueless about the key achievements of his
presidency. Polls show that only 12 percent of
Americans realize that Obama cut their taxes; indeed,
twice that number thought the president had raised
them. Just 29 percent understand that the stimulus
boosted the economy, and 81 percent believe that the
deficit-slashing health care reform will actually
increase the deficit.

"You have this conundrum," says Wilentz, the Princeton
historian. "Obama has an admirable record of
accomplishment, but the political dynamics are all
moving the other way. How do you explain that?"

Pressed on this disconnect, Axelrod argues that the
president has been too busy with governance to get
caught up in the scrum of politics. "We're focused on
trying to build a better country for the future," he
says. "The president's attitude is that the politics
will ultimately take care of itself."

But heading into November, it appears that the
president's high-minded and seemingly sincere disdain
for politics could prove the undoing of what he has
fought so hard to accomplish. Yes, he has succeeded in
moving the Senate to action - but along the way he has
fumbled the support of his own electorate. Progressive
activists in the party remain convinced that Obama
could have won even grander victories, if only he had
been willing to fight harder and compromise less.
Having deeply invested in the image Obama sold them as
a candidate - a new breed of politician, determined to
bring radical transparency to Washington and open up
government to average Americans - they have experienced
his reliance on backroom negotiations as nothing short
of a personal betrayal. And instead of working to
soothe disgruntled supporters, Obama and his inner
circle have flamed the discontent by telling liberal
critics to "stop whining" and "buck up."

"It's somewhat inexplicable why his record hasn't been
communicated better, particularly the health care
bill," says Goodwin. "That's the responsibility of the
president - and we thought of him as such a good
communicator." The mishandling of the politics of
health care reform, adds Wilentz, has cost Obama
dearly. "Where was the moment?" he says. "There should
have been goose bumps: health care! But it didn't
happen. What should have been a crescendo was a
diminuendo. You have this great accomplishment and
everybody feels terrible - because of the politics."

Even in the aftermath of the law's passage, Obama did
not use his legendary political gifts to help voters
look past the ugly tactics and appreciate the historic
gains that had been accomplished. Nor did he seek out a
political salve - say, an immediate suspension of Don't
Ask, Don't Tell - to ease their discontent. As a
result, instead of heading into the midterm elections
with popular support for his historic victories, Obama
and his fellow Democrats have been forced to retreat
into a much-diminished argument: You may not like us,
but the Republicans are way worse. "Folks, wake up!"
Obama hollered at a recent fundraiser in Philadelphia.
"This is not some academic exercise. Don't compare us
to the Almighty - compare us to the alternative."

In an hour-long interview with Rolling Stone, Axelrod
struck a conciliatory tone. What Obama has delivered as
president, he concedes, has fallen short of the
expectations Obama inspired as a candidate. "I
understand why there's this dissonance out there,"
Axelrod says. "But Democrats don't have the luxury of
lamenting the fact that we've only gotten 70 to 80
percent of what we wanted done. Because that 70 to 80
percent is at risk."

That much, at least, is undeniable. In their Pledge to
America, the Republicans have vowed to roll back health
care reform and block any unspent stimulus funds. Sen.
Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate
Banking Committee, has promised to gut the consumer
protections of Wall Street reform. Armed with subpoena
power, Republicans could soon dog the administration
with ginned-up scandals and kangaroo-court drama, even
as the party tries to shut down the government under
House Speaker John Boehner.

"There's so much at stake here," Axelrod says, almost
pleading. "And we ought to fight like hell - because
what's on the other side is a retrograde disaster."

This is an article from the October 28, 2010 issue of
Rolling Stone.

_____________________________________________

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