I don't know what a "liberal" is supposed to be.  They use this term a lot in the major media.  I really don't understand what it signifies.

But I think people of all stripes tend to evaluate their political leadership in relation to the kind of country they would like to live in, and whether or not the leadership is on a path that seems broadly aimed at creating that country.  They don't evaluate the leadership in relationship to the diminished expectations that are continually delivered by the sorry state of the country they do live in, and by the political parties who run that country in accordance with its prevailing, suboptimal norms and standards.

Politics isn't some sort of game where the goal is to just rate presidents by the standards of other presidents, in the way you might rate baseball mangers.  It's the business of changing the world.  If people are significantly dissatisfied with the world, and if the things they are dissatisfied with are the kinds of things that could be changed, in principle, by human action in the political sphere, they they will and should remain dissatisfied with their political leaders.  They should berate and criticize those leaders so that the leaders are constantly made aware of the degree of dissatisfaction, and of the large gap between aspirations and performance.

It's not the job of progressives or anybody else to make their leaders comfortable by pretending to be satisfied with things they are not at all satisfied with; or by adjusting their attitudes so that they actually are satisfied with all the things others are satisfied with.

Most progressives don't just think the progress has been slow.  We think that Obama's fundamental values and priorities are different than ours.  It's not that he's made some tactical and political blunders on the progressive path.   It's that he's on a neoliberal path, and that is not the progressive path.   There is simply nothing very progressive about the overall approach of debt hysteria and austerity mongering that has characterized Obama's last 18 months.  He's still a practitioner, it seems, of Rubinomics and Third Wayism.  That is not a progressive outlook.

But we're trapped.   If we lived in a different kind of political system, there is no doubt that there would be several additional political parties, and progressives would vote for politicians who more nearly support their values.   But we don't have those options in America.   I can understand arguments to the effect that reality is reality in America, and everybody has to suck it up and vote for the least miserable of the two miserable options.   But I can't understand arguments that claim we ought to be "satisfied".  From the progressive point of view this country and its leadership are deeply and depressingly unsatisfying.  You can't squeeze satisfaction out of the inherently unsatisfactory.  Progressives vote for Democrats mainly out of necessity.   That's probably not going to change.

Some of us did think Obama would be less bad than usual.   In some of his speeches during 2005, 2006 and 2007 he indicated a strong appreciation of the New Deal tradition.  Faced with his own version of the same kinds of problems Roosevelt faced, Obama has not in any way articulated the same kind of vision that Roosevelt advanced.   There are few dozen other things we hoped he might be more interested in accomplishing.   These have been outlined ad nauseum over the past couple of years by progressives.   But no matter how many times we lay them out, mainstreamers either refuse to accept that progressives have the values they do in fact have, or they get angry at us for having those values.

I'm so tired of arguing about Obama.  He represents part of the major party reality-television version of politics that I have mostly turned off.   He really doesn't speak to me. And every time I read another of these mainstream harangues that attempt to psychologize progressives, and suggest that our dissatisfaction only stems from some sort of intellectual of emotional deficiency, it only intensifies my sense of separation from mainstream Democrats.

I think Chait did a pretty damn good job of going over the history of past presidencies for this length--rather than say, a book---I'm impressed with the piece. Except with Clinton, he covered Clinton's first term because it fit the narrative of unhappy liberals, but he left out Clinton's second term, perhaps because it didn't fit the narrative. Because Clinton's approval ratings in the second term left only the 1/3 conservative in the country disapproving. The liberals complaining then were few and far between. Of course, the whole country got distracted by the Lewinsky/impeachment thing, which complicates. Some of the approval then from liberals have been liberals supporting him in the face of the "vast right wing conspiracy" and not on policy.

I especially liked Chait's reality-based summary on FDR, page 3:

...An exception to this trend, but only a partial exception, is Franklin Roosevelt, the most esteemed of the historical Democratic president-saints. Roosevelt is hard to compare to anybody, because his achievements were so enormous, and his failures so large as well (court-packing, interning Japanese-Americans). But even his triumphs, gleaming monuments to liberalism when viewed from the historical distance, appear, at closer inspection, to be riddled with the same tribulations, reversals, compromises, dysfunctions, and failures as any other.  He ran castigating Herbert Hoover for permitting high deficits, then immediately passed an austerity budget in his first year. Roosevelt did come around to Keynesian stimulus, but he never seemed to understand it, and in 1937 he reversed himself again by cutting spending, helping plunge the economy into a second depression eventually mitigated only by war spending.

Liberals frustrated with Obama’s failure to assail Wall Street have quoted FDR’s 1936 speech denouncing “economic royalists,” but that represented just a brief period of Roosevelt’s presidency. Mostly he tried to placate business. When he refused to empower a government panel charged with enforcing labor rights, a liberal senator complained, “The New Deal is being strangled in the house of its friends.”

Roosevelt constantly feared his work-relief programs would create a permanent class of dependents, so he made them stingy. He kept the least able workers out of federal programs, and thus “placed them at the mercy of state governments, badly equipped to handle them and often indifferent to their plight,” recalled historian William Leuchtenburg. Even his greatest triumphs were shot through with compromise. Social Security offered meager benefits (which were expanded under subsequent administrations), was financed by a regressive tax, and, to placate southern Democrats, was carefully tailored to exclude domestic workers and other black-dominated professions.

Compared with other Democratic presidents, Roosevelt enjoyed relatively friendly relations with liberals, but there nonetheless existed a left opposition during his time, mostly of socialists and communists, who criticized him relentlessly. Progressive senator Burton Wheeler complained that FDR, “for all his fine talk, really preferred conservatives to progressives.” And actually, the Roosevelt era had the same pattern we see today, of liberals angry with the administration’s compromises, and the administration angry in turn at the liberals. In 1935, Roosevelt adviser Rex Tugwell groused of the liberals, “They complain incessantly that the administration is moving into the conservative camp, but do nothing to keep it from going there.”....

There is also this quote under FDR's picture in the article, a nice find:

Many liberals are saying good-bye to hoping and praying. —William Harlan Hale, Common Sense, 1934

In Sunday's NYT Magazine, Rebecca Traister has a piece that argues that some on the left appear to have found a new hopey changey savior to deliver them from politics of the possible:

Heaven Is a Place Called Elizabeth Warren

An excerpt from the end:

.....It’s not that Warren’s supporters shouldn’t get lathered up about her. Staid appreciation for competent candidates has never made ballot boxes burst, and political dedication by its nature requires a degree of magical thinking: a privileging of optimism over lived experience.

But many of the people looking to Warren, as they did to Obama before her, are expecting material things — like readable credit-card pitches or safe bridges or jobs or a vote on a bill to create jobs — that are, at the moment, figments as imaginative as dragons and their slayers. And that’s dangerous, because when the person we decided was going to fix it all isn’t able to change much, it’s not just that we get blue but also that we give up. We mistake the errors of our own overblown estimations for broken promises. And instead of learning, reasonably, that one person can’t do everything, we persuade ourselves that no person can do anything.

The key is not just emotional investment in election-year saviors but also an engagement with policy. A commitment to organized expressions of political desire — like those that have been harnessed so effectively in recent years on the right — have been absent for far too long in Democratic politics. Now, with labor protests, campaigns to block voter suppression and personhood measures and the occupations of cities around the nation, there seem to be some small signs that liberals are remembering that politics requires more of them, that they need movements, not just messiahs. But their engagement must deepen, broaden and persist beyond last week’s elections and well beyond next year’s elections if there is any chance for politicians like Warren to succeed.

Because while she might provide her supporters and her constituents a voice that, if properly tuned, will rattle doors that are now gummed shut, what Elizabeth Warren cannot do is fix this mess herself. ....

Oh. My. 

Here we go again. 

Jonathon Chait, Democratic salesman for George W. Bush's illicit and disastrous invasion of Iraq; TNR-mobilized attack dog for the re-election of Joe Lieberman; and now New York Magazine's credentialed arbiter of opinion on the progressive bona fides of Barack Obama.

Trashing liberals for questioning the invasion of Iraq (Chait's "just war.")? Check. Trashing liberals for opposing the re-election of Joe Lieberman (TNR's serious and responsible candidate)? Check. Trashing liberals for questioning the progressive record of Barack Obama? Check.

It's all part of a pattern. Chait and a number of his fellow-TNR-travellers are still good earners for the liberal-bashing family of opinion thugs that rule corporate media.

Why are we contending over what Jonathan Chait thinks? It must be because we enjoy tearing each other apart. After all, isn't that what dysfunctional families do?