1115.org

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Matt Stoller has pointed out that some leading liberal bloggers, who are not exactly enamored of Hillary Clinton, and who would have very much liked to find Barack Obama a man they could get behind, are openly expressing disenchantment with Obama, specifically his lack of leadership.

Last Thursday Greg Saunders wrote in HuffPo:

If you look around the liberal blogs today, there’s a lot of frustration with the Senate bill to grant immunity to telecoms who have helped the Bush administration illegally spy on Americans. High profile bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, Markos Moulitsas, Atrios, Jane Hamsher, and Big Tent Democrat at MyDD have been urging their readers to put pressure on the Senate to block the bill by contacting…Chris Dodd.

If anyone from the Obama campign is paying attention, this should serve as a wake-up call. A representative cross section of the liberal blogosphere no longer thinks Barack Obama is willing to stand up to the Bush Administration. These bloggers have already been disappointed enough over the last few months they didn’t even bother asking Obama to oppose the bill this time around, instead throwing their support behind a candidate who’s trailing Dennis Kucinich and Undecided in the polls.

Saunders is still a stauch Obama supporter; he continues: “It’s not too late for Obama to turn things around. I still think Obama would make a fantastic president…”

But Markos quoted from Saunders’ post and added:

Yeah, for a guy who claims he’s going to “challenge the status quo”, Obama sure as heck has done none of that as of late.

I’m tired of words. At this point, the only thing that speaks is action.

Josh Marshall skewered Obama in a 7-word post (Obama comes out against telco immunity deal.) with a headline that consists of 3 words and some punctuation marks (Day Late and …?). Jane Hamsher labeled Obama’s follow-the-leader support of Dodd’s opposition to retroactive immunity ‘All Hat, No Cattle‘. And then added for good measure: “That’s great, Senator, I’m so happy. Now what do you intend to do about it?”

Surveying these posts, Stoller’s take is:

It’s a remarkable collapse in credibility, picking up speed recently at an accelerating pace. …

…while Obama is doing pretty well online, I’m struck by the utter contempt with which he is held by these opinion leaders.

There seems to be this sense of cynicism about Obama, and it runs deeper every day. Rather than the campaign heating up after labor day, which is what I was constantly told would happen by the Obama people, the perception of Obama as a rudderless operator has congealed. The gloves didn’t come off. I can’t say I’m surprised.

I think this is a positive development, as it suggests the environment has become more difficult for those who will not lead.

Clearly, there’s a lot of disenchantment going around, and that’s before l’affaire de McClurkin. A sense that Obama has failed to deliver on the grand promises of leadership that rolled so sonorously off his tongue.

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No doubt Stoller and Markos and Marshall and Hamsher are all honorable bloggers, but their relatively recent disenchantment with Obama begs the question: what took you so long, guys?

The writing was on the wall from the very beginning. Matt has been reading it, and reciting it since October 3, 2005. That’s right, two years ago. Talk about being WAY ahead of the curve!

Everybody seems to start from the same point. “I want to like Barack Obama, I really do.” And everyone seems to end up at the same point too. Some just get there much earlier than others. This is where Matt ended up two years ago:

… as we’re forced to wander in the wilderness looking for the savior Obama was billed by some to be. But as we search on, Obama preaches tolerance of our own politicians who value their reelection chances more than the people they need votes from, along with bipartisanship and compromise with those on the other side of the aisle who routinely break Senate and House rules, pay journalists for propaganda, smear our officials, and accuse us of being un-American.

What Matt picked up on, very early, were two interwined issues, essentially. Obama was not running as a Democrat, he was running as Obama. What he was selling was not the Democratic agenda; what he was selling was his proclaimed ability to bring people together and forge consensus. He was going to heal all our George Bush wounds by applying the balm of compromise.

Matt really didn’t care a whole lot for Obama’s habit of publicly criticizing other Democrats and the Democratic party. He cared even less for Obama’s defining principle of bipartisan compromise:

Obama is out there trying to define himself (and drag the Democratic party along) by starting with the assumption that traditional Democratic ideals are unacceptable, and the only way to get to the (political?) promised land is by setting up false straw men representing anonymous Democrats who stand for something supposedly abhorrent, bashing them, and then proposing a policy that somehow splits the difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Thus the Democratic position is shifted to the right even before any real negotiations have occurred. Bad for Democrats who believe in their principles, good for Obama who gets to play knight in shining armor, unfortunately “leading” by the “kick down” method.

Matt also taxed Obama with constantly invoking the mantra of bipartisan compromise without ever spelling out what kind of compromises he proposed to forge on what issues, what kind of compromises were even possible:

Obama constantly repeats the word bipartisan as if the magical solution to the problems we face is somehow averaging the positions between the two sides. Funny, in his three years on the national scene, I’ve never heard him say a word about how this is supposed to work. Are we talking about splitting the difference on every issue, or is each side supposed to sacrifice half of their principles in order to get their way the other half? How do you come to a bipartisan resolution on abortion if the one we have now (don’t want one? don’t get one) isn’t enough? What is the halfway point between the Darwinian market-worshipers and those who want the basic services the state has been providing since the New Deal? And why would the answer to any of these questions automatically be a better policy than the respective lines in the sand drawn by either side? There is nothing inherently good about reflexive centrism any more than there is about reflexive partisanship, left or right. I’d love to see a campaign that pits a Democrat pushing Democratic ideas against a Republican pushing Republican ideas because I agree with former President Clinton that “Our way works better.” If Obama doesn’t think that’s the case, he shouldn’t be running as a Democrat. If he wants to “transcend partisan politics” he shouldn’t be running as a Democrat.

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When we ran posts critical of Obama, legions of Obama supporters would emerge from the woodwork and jump to his defense. They were invariably deeply offended (and sometimes offensive), deeply emotional and very short on substantive responses to the specific criticisms that were made. There was something about this response that always struck me as disturbingly cult-like. It felt very much like Obama had, perhaps unintentionally, managed to create a cult around himself.

Frustrated that none of Obama’s supporters would substantively debate him on the issues, Matt repeatedly invited such debate. To the point where he offered one of the more offended (and more offensive) Obama supporters, a guy with his own blog, that we would publish on the front page of our blog any reasoned response he cared to write to Matt’s central criticisms of the Obama campaign. After accepting this invitation, said blogger never delivered on that promise. When Matt pointed this out, said blogger erupted (on his own blog, mostly) in yet another round of ad hominem attacks and childish taunting, and the kind of really sorry garbage one expects only from the more demented righty blogs. Oh, and we were also treated to a full round of insisting that 10:42 am Eastern time is four hours before 8 am Pacific time. This little performance — which just about summarizes the whole intellectual caliber of his engagement with 1115 — was also characterized by the derisive dismissiveness that (for who knows what chip-on-the-shoulder reasons) he displayed towards Matt and I from the very beginning.

(Another Obama supporter did decide to take up Matt’s invitation, but let’s just say he fell short. He had planned a two-part response: first I summarize your position, then I respond once you confirm I have got your position right. Somehow, we never got to stage two.)

So why did it take the leading luminaries of the liberal blogosphere so long to catch on, and why has Obama’s (and his sycophants’) failure to define his terms been allowed to linger?

This here is, of course, yet another Obama-critical post. We still invite (which is to say Matt still hungers for) reasoned debate. We would prefer that the debate be about Matt’s criticism of Obama’s presidential campaign, and not about my having the white-woman-for-black-man hots for Obama. We would also point out that attacking Edwards does not equate to defending Obama (except, it seems, in the eyes of said blogger, and his cheering comments section).