Obama and the "left"

I stumbled on a great blog, Sadly No!, while reading something else. I thought this post was terrific and captured my current feelings perfectly:

I honestly don’t know why a lot of folks ever really believed that Obama was the second coming of FDR when all he really ever aspired to be was the second coming of Bill Clinton. The guy always presented himself as a middle-of-the-road establishment Democrat who eschewed populism in favor of “post-partisanship” (whatever the hell that means). And c’mon, people: how much change could you really expect from a guy who chose Joe Biden to be his veep?

Now, I knew this perfectly well going into the 2008 election. And I was still incredibly enthusiastic about supporting the guy. Why? Because this country had been run for the previous eight years by sociopathic wingnuts and I didn’t want another sociopathic wingnut running the country for another four years. I didn’t want to go to war with Iran and I didn’t want to go to war with Syria. Also, I didn’t want to have a certifiable moron as vice president. These sorts of things are important to me.

And yes, I realize how sad it is that my standards have fallen so low, but that’s how things are. As long as my government is not actively trying to destroy the entire world, I feel OK about things. Others’ mileage may vary, but that’s sorta where I’m at.

I think the larger problem is that a lot of folks on the left seemed to think that electing a black dude with the middle name “Hussein” (and don’t get me wrong, that is pretty awesome) would magically overturn decades’ worth of propaganda aimed at getting Americans to believe that corporate America’s Big Money Boyz are our bestest friends in the world and that they’re being oppressed by a wicked government that doesn’t think it’s “politically correct” to sell toxic waste to school children. That’s something that’s going to require long-term siege warfare. And it also means that we need more folks like Taibbi who have the balls to stand up to people in power and fewer folks talking about Obama as a brilliant eleven-dimensional tactician.

Obama for all his faults is a welcome relief from having sociopaths run the government. But that doesn’t mean that anyone on the left should count on him to do anything they want done.