Progressives Ask: Is It Obama, Or Is It Us?

Andrea Seabrook
National Public Radio
6/8/2010

Left-wing activists described the year leading up to Barack Obama’s election as exhilarating, empowering and exciting.

Now, if you ask progressives gathered for the America’s Future Now conference in Washington, D.C., about the first year and a half of his presidency, they say:

“Frustrating.”

“Sobering.”

“Brutal.”

At least, those were the reactions of, respectively, union activist Nick Weiner, University of Minnesota political science professor Dara Strolovitch, and Steve Peha, who heads an education reform consultancy.

“I had hoped for something different,” Peha explains. “I had hoped for the president who ran for office, and not so much the one who’s in office.”

Peha says he’s a pragmatist — he knows that campaigning and governing are different. But “what I wish is that President Obama had worked a little less for his ideal of bipartisanship and a little more for the people who elected him,” he says.

This is the prevailing feeling at this week’s America’s Future Now conference. And no one is hiding it.

“It seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? Barack Obama was going to take office, he was going to change the world and we would just go home and hit the couch,” liberal blogger and pundit Arianna Huffington said during the conference’s very first panel of speakers.

The head of the Campaign for America’s Future, which runs this conference, called the new White House an uncertain trumpet. For example, its financial reforms, he said, are too timid and too readily compromised.

The article continues at NPR.org

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