Doesn't maintaining a situation where the current policies enacted by Democrats are seen as progressive undermine progressive objectives over the long term?

In a way yes, but that is too complex an analysis. The vast majority simply accepts Obama's policies as "progressive" and judges them as such. Maybe they don't use that word; maybe they call them "Democrat" or "big government," or "tax and spending."

Right now, there is some thought his policies aren't working, but there's also something that things are "better" than they would have been and there's a slow recovery. If he gets turned out, he and his policies will be seen as having not worked and been repudiated by the wise electorate. This is my macroview and my main point.

There will only be the tiniest of groundswells of feeling that Obama didn't go far enough, didn't enact a public option, didn't spend 1.3 trillion. People will say in a sort of common sense way: "Heck, if 800 billion didn't do it, what makes you think 1.3 trillion will do? Why throw good money after bad. Don't make no sense? If you're in a hole, stop digging, etc., etc."

I think it's absurd to think that after an Obama defeat, a Bernie Sanders or Russ Feingold or Dennis Kucinich will be able to gain any traction saying: "Obama wasn't really a progressive, wasn't really a liberal, was Republican lite. You haven't given our ideas a real try. We need to spend an additional 1.3 trillion to get this economy moving!"

Before THAT could work, the economy will have to tank-tank-tank to the point where people are desperate for ANYTHING that sounds different and hopeful enough to possibly help.

Hard political reality is that people will empirically like and respond to policy promises that they like and respond to. Call 'em whatever you want.

One trouble with your analysis is that, on the one hand, you want to say that the people respond to policies unmediated by media interpretation and narrative (above). But below, you paint the media as sort of all-powerful in their ability to craft people's views of various people and policies. You can't have it both ways.

Also, before the people can experience a policy "empirically," the guy or gal will have to sell them on those ideas--via the media, etc.--in ways that prevent the opposition from painting them as more of the same that just failed. Unless he can do that and GET ELECTED, then folks will never to get to an empirical experience of what he's talking about. And that's assuming that, once elected, he can get it past the Republicans.

Assuming he maintains some sort of messaging continuity, to me a second-term loss would indicate people don't trust Obama to follow through with the promises that led them to vote for him in the first place.

How do you know why "they" voted for him other than through polling and surveys and media accounts and anecdotal reporting? I've had a number of people who voted for him tell me they didn't vote for a "government take over of health care." In fact, for some people, health care was barely on the radar screen if my anecdotes are representative. Not everyone reads the bumpf you read and then expects the Burger Flipper In Chief to follow orders.

Unless, of course, Romney sticks with Obama's approach - which most generally agree isn't particularly progressive. This should allow clever folks to re-brand the crap-policy as republican (which the current policy approach sort of is, historically speaking) with Obamney tied at the hip for 2016. If people generally aren't happy, Romney proves that Obama wasn't really a Democrat (much as the GOP will likely to do with Obama to brand Bush's less-popular policies "Democratic after-all" here in a bit) ... and their base will be pissed as hell regardless the outcomes.

You're flipping around here so much, it's hard for me to comment. Needless to say, folks don't parse these things with all the switch-backs you insert here (IMO). The broad narrative here is that Obama spent a lot of money. That's what most people think he did. They're also not sure it worked or will work.

Romney, if you read his bumpf, which seems to be something you really count on, is promising no spending and the usual combination of tax cuts, less regulation, and more trade agreements. So, unless he sticks to his promises, he--by your logic--will piss off a lot of people who thought they were voting for THAT. If the economy improves after THAT, then we can safely assume that Obama's stimulus worked, but took longer to work than expected and folks just lacked patience. Romney WILL get credit for it and, simultaneously, spending money will be discredited.

(Or, we may be forced to admit that the Republican approach--cutting spending, taxes, etc.--DID work and Obama didn't do enough of THAT. Or perhaps we'll conclude that it was a timing issue, i.e., cutting spending only works after the economy is moving a bit, even if not much, but when it works, it really works.)

OTOH, it's entirely possible that Romney will find a way to spend a lot of money, like Nixon going to China, and will get credit for any good it does. But he will only be able to spend a lot of money because he, unlike Obama, will have a compliant or cooperative Congress, with some dissenters, of course. Democrats, to their credit, are never as obstructionist as the Republicans and certainly not THESE Republicans. We will be in the odd position where only a Republican president can spend money.

The figures I've seen on RomneyCare in MA is that it has substantially lowered premiums on INDIVIDUAL policies, but has yet to control costs. They plan to work on that next. That strikes me as sensible. If certain folks are getting shafted, then that's a fix that needs to be made.

As far as DADT goes, most folks may not care about it, but honestly most folks were happy with their health care, too. But none of this means that DADT isn't important and isn't worth fighting for for progressives. With Fin-Reg, if it's repealed following a Romney victory, folks won't say: The bill didn't go far enough because that won't be the victors' narrative. The whole regulatory effort will be discredited. Folks will be angry at the big banks, but if the economy starts chugging, they won't care. As someone said to me: "Who cares if someone at GS made a bunch of money. What's that too me."

OTOH, if Obama prevails, it will REAFFIRM the rightness of his policies in people's minds. They will get a chance to experience the benefits--however meager you want to characterize them--of the HCR, and the stage will be set to BUILD on them. People will have a chance to feel comfortable with these changes (fear of the unknown in an unstable time was one big reason for all the opposition), such as they are, and it will be much easier to take the next steps.

The point for me is to focus on changing the dynamic and helping the progressive wing of the Democratic Party capture the party's power center, platform and agenda.  I'm not going to cower in fear that if we make any dissenting and abrasive noises, Democrats might not win, and then the probability of puppies and ponies falling from the skies goes down from 10% to 0%.  If you fight, you might not win and you run risks.  If out of fear you don't fight at all, you know from the outset that you will lose.

The Tea Party made themselves giant pains in the asses, and now they are effectively running not only the House of Representatives, but the entire country.  They control the message and the political dynamic in America.  It looks like that is the way you get things done in this country.   You have to be the most obnoxiously squeaky wheel you can.  Your opponents are intimidated by the zeal, anger and insistence, and eventually start submitting to your bidding.

Obama, as far as I can tell, is pursuing a passive-aggressive strategy for moving the Democratic Party further to the right, without copping to that strategy.  He's resisting the barrage of Tea Party dogmas, attacks and declamations in - shall we say - a not notably spirited manner.  The Tea Party has a philosophy and agenda.   This week they took a flame-thrower to what was the budget of my State of new Hampshire, and then took a victory lap.

Nobody can tell what Obama's philosophy or agenda is other than to stand up in a limp way for a generic reasonableness and for "our values" - values he never defines in a clear, spirited and unambiguous way.  People are invited to project whatever they want onto this invocation of our values, and assume Obama is defending the values they project.  But he just drifts and waits.  The result will be that he is "forced" in the end, under the gun of the debt ceiling pressure, to "compromise": that is, to implement the right-tilting cuts and reforms it appears he really wants to implement anyway.  Obama is a Pete Peterson acolyte, but knows that won't fly with 2/3s of his own party.   So he has to be subtle and wily about where he's going.   He stacked the deck when he named his deficit reduction commission, and its been all downhill for the progressive wing since then.

Right now, the situation is intolerable for progressives, and the Obama administration is itself standing in the way of progress.  As the saying goes, I want Obama to either lead, follow or get out of the way.  But he's going to be called out by the progressive wing of the party until we get other Democrats to stop living in fear, and join us in ratcheting up the pressure.  The Obama agenda, such as it exists now in its decadent and uninspiring and quasi-Republican form, is dead wrong for America and a long-term threat to the possibility of real progressive change.  I think progressives can eventually convince most black Americans of this truth as well.  I can understand why people might feel things are getting better solely on the basis of the fact that America elected a black president.  But I hope that the concrete evidence of historically high rates of black unemployment will eventually convince them that Obama's current economic agenda and approach are bad for black America.  We need black Americans to start pressuring Obama with the message: "Do better!"  It's not about him personally.  It's about the vewry wrong course he has taken since the end of 2009.

Honestly, any politician who looks double digit unemployment in the face and says "it's up to the private sector now", has only a slim claim on being called a Democrat.   Maybe Obama, Geithner, Bowles, Bayh and the rest of them should form a third party of their own so they can just kick the left to the curb without kicking us under the bus.  When I look at them, I don't recognize the party I have always belonged to.

No.

Absolutely on the money. Abortion is the main reason Republicans get elected. The chance that they'll help turn us into a Christian nation with clerics running things is number two. Which ties in nicely with number one. 

It matters not that even when the Republicans had the majority they did nothing about abortion.  Nothing changed under GWB.  But they'll keep putting them in there because they know there's a snowball's chance with them whereas with our guys, not so much.  The country will be in ruins but they'll still be talking about murdering babies.

I'm not making any predictions about the future if the Right Wingers and the Tea Party make the kind of headway that now seems possible.  I don't even want to think about it.

Good point.

Passion, idealism, and high principle each can stir the blood--and a party's faithful.  Which can help win elections if what the public perceives of that isn't scary.  "Pragmatism", or what passes for it, not always so much.

Thus we have references to Obama "debating with himself" or "negotiating with himself".  These are traits that people who see themselves as intellectual, or intellectuals, tend to value.  Those traits may be better than their opposites for governing to the extent that more searching and careful thinking prior to decisions, and better listening to criticisms to benefit from and learn from them, tend to lead to better decisions overall than governing by ideology.

The public seems to prefer its Presidents strong, confident, optimistic, resolute, and decisive. Bill Clinton: "Better to be seen as strong and wrong, than weak and right."  We may have a general tendency in this society to perceive someone who comes off as intellectual as--not always correctly--deficient on these other qualities we value.  

We've had a number of Presidents, usually Republicans, who seemed to be at no great pains to show people they are learned, but rather quite the opposite, that they are plain, ordinary men of the people.  Eisenhower and Reagan were both a lot smarter and more aware than the public personas they projected.  They'd get called dumb by some and not be bothered by that, knowing that many citizens on hearing that respond by seeing the media critics and political opponents who make those charges as elitist and also rude and maybe subversive and unpatriotic snobs, rather than believing their President really is dumb.  

That has dovetailed nicely with a frequent GOP narrative in recent decades that Democrats are snooty, elitist intellectual types, not tough enough, not possessed of enough common sense, and maybe a tad weird to be entrusted with the Oval Office.

Oh, and no problem on my second try.  If I write it more clearly the first time maybe I won't need to go back and do it again.