I think both parties tend to have the problem I’m about to talk about, but I’m more aware of it in the Democratic Party since those are the blogs and websites I visit.
For two elections in a row, it seems that the liberal base of the democratic party is being told “I told you so” by the more moderate and centrist wings of the party. Not necessarily on what works, but on exactly what the agenda of the party, or in 2008, their favored Presidential candidate stands for.
In 2006, Democrats made two things perfect, crystal, 100% clear: they were not going to pursue impeachment, and they were going to try to change the course of the Iraq War, which hopefully result in their end, but they were not going to do anything like cut off funding.
Then, when the Democrats went in and failed to start impeachment and didn’t cut of funding for the war, the left was horrified that the Democrats didn’t do these things which, by the way, where things they had promised not to do to begin with if people had paid attention.
One of the candidates which they seem most disappointed in is Jim Webb, who some people seemed to have it in their mind as being the second coming of Russ Feingold or something, and then when he starts voting on conservative things, they complain, even though his ideology and beliefs should have been known by anyone paying even cursury attention to his candidacy.
Obama in 2008 is the same way. The left seems suddenly shocked and horrified that Obama is now announcing (or reaffirming) policy positions in the center when there was absolutley no reason to believe otherwise to start with. They saw his calls for “change” as being equivilent to “I’m a Liberal Progressive” when such an assumption had no basis in anything.
Obama may very well be for change. In fact, if the change is being defined has how he’ll run things vs. Bush, then he definitely will bring change. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be a liberal hero.
I’ve said this repeatedly before: one reason why I never got on the change bandwagon is because Obama never gave me any actual reason to. How was he going to be different? He said he would be “post-partisan,” but people for some reason didn’t read this as code word for “triangulation.” In fact, they assumed the opposite.
I’m not saying trianulation is bad. In fact, I think it’s largely necessary to win a Presidential electon unless you’re in a situation where you’re almost assured to route the other candidate. But, how people interpreted “post-partisan” as anything other than “I’ll work with republicans to get things done” I have absolutely no idea. (there are even some instances where they fully realized that, and then when he does it, they complain that he’s doing it, but still supposedly support his post-partisanship. How that even works, I’m not sure).
I would have to say, seeing what I’ve seen now, if the primary were still going on I would probably be fully behind Clinton’s camp. However, the point is moot at this point as all the primaries have been done, and there is no way the supers are going against that unless just something horrible comes out about Obama.
The most annoying aspects about this to me is that, now only after the primary is over are liberal blogs and the media seemingly interested in Obama’s actual policy positions. During the primary it was all “change” and “hope” and all that jazz, and Obama talked about rather safe Democratic issues like health care and ending the Iraq War – things that basically all democrats agree upon to begin with.
Other things like the death penalty, gun control, and the like were never really brought up, even though, while those may not be major issues, those are the issues which creates the most disagreement among democrats.
Yes, I’ll still support, vote for, and probably donate money to Obama in the campaign. A democratic administration is better than a GOP one, and I don’t really have all that much issue with Obama as he’s showing himself to be. However, I somehow get grimly smug when other people are like “OMG Obama isn’t who we thought he was” when they only reason they thought he was someone else is because they had convinced themselves he was someone else. This is especially so since the primary argument against Clinton on most blogs amounted to basically “we can’t trust her” because she would, they argued, take the politically expedient position on an issue. Oops. (In fact, one of the defenses of Obama was that “Clinton would have voted for it too” had she been the nominee, something which has basically 0 basis in fact. It may very well have been true, but they can’t support their argument for it with anything.)
I’ll agree with most people when they say that Obama actually hasn’t really flip-flopped at all. He can even largely get out of the flip-flop accusation for FISA by saying that it was a different bill. It’s not that Obama has actually changed positions on the issues, it’s that Obama’s positions on the issues are different from what people perceived his positions on those issues were.
Some people have said that if Obama loses enough support through all this to lose in November, that it is his fault. While that’s true to an extent by playing the “hope” and “change” card in the primary and not revealing some of his positions until after the primary, I think the larger fault falls on most of his supporters who took what he said with faith and without any actual rational reason to do so other than based on, you guessed it, hope. Unfortunately, as many of Clinton supporters tried to point out, you can’t really run a campaign on hope.
