Barack Obama and the Midterms

President Barack Obama

Six years ago, I wasn't particularly sold on Barack Obama.  I had been a Hillary Clinton supporter through-and-through in the primaries, and had to admit that I was a little bit leery about this junior senator from Illinois.  I was smarting that he hadn't picked Hillary as his running mate.  I was nervous about handing over the reigns of the country to a man with so little foreign policy experience.  After all, we were fighting wars on two fronts and the bulk of the Aughts had focused on terrorism and international issues, rather than domestic policy.  I also wasn't particularly taken with his message of hope and change.  I had seen what hope and change had done in the years after Al Gore lost.  Climate change science had been demonized to within an inch of its life.  We were fighting a war that seemed unwinnable and one that was based on a faulty, potentially criminal set of reasons for entry.  And I had felt what it was like to be the target of intense hatred on a national level.  I came out of the closet mere weeks before George W. Bush won reelection in a campaign that was deeply hateful, and featured incredibly cruel and bigoted attacks on gay Americans and their rights.  I watched as a war hero got Swift Boated for his service, and was forced to carry the banner for gay people as best he could.  If storied progressives like Al Gore and John Kerry couldn't make a difference against such attacks, how could someone with such little experience in Washington make a difference?

My cynicism was pretty high headed into that November night in 2008, and while I voted for Barack Obama, it wasn't necessarily because I believed in him as a candidate, but because I needed the Bush administration to be over.  I needed someone who wasn't going to demonize gay people to get swing voters and I needed someone who wanted an end to the War in Iraq.  I also wanted someone who could at the very least curb the tide on some of the Republican issues, and perhaps help us to tread water after eight years in the wilderness.  What I really didn't believe, however, was the hope and change message that Sen. Obama had championed throughout his campaign.

In the years since, I have had moments of deep pride and deep disappoint with President Obama in the White House.  I cried in my office as I watched him endorse gay marriage before the 2012 presidential election, putting as much healing as one ever will be able to do on the 2004 presidential election in my mind.  I was incredibly proud watching him put to bed a national nightmare when he announced that Osama bin Laden had been caught and killed.  I was deeply moved by the way that he handled the Trayvon Martin trial, acknowledging the growing racial inequities in the American judicial system.  And I was incredibly proud when he passed the Affordable Care Act, a big f@#%ing deal, as our Vice President memorably stated.

There have been, of course, failings in his administration.  The rollout of healthcare.gov was pretty much unforgivable.  I wish that the Democrats had done more in those first two years of universal control on everything from the DREAM Act to ENDA to more judicial appointments.  I have been deeply saddened by the lack of progress we've made on medical research, space exploration, and climate change, and I continue to be a bit appalled by the fourth amendment rights violations by the NSA and the fact that Guantanamo still is open and houses detainees.  However, six years later, I find that the hope and change that President Obama championed didn't have to be a mirage, and that deepens my disappointment with the 2010 and 2014 Midterms more than anything.

Barack Obama may not have been the savviest politician in his first term (he should have seen after the nastiness of the presidential election, with attacks on his religion and even his citizenship, that we had entered a new ball game and tried to forge ahead without the Republicans since his majorities didn't need them), but his heart was in the right place, perhaps in the best place any president's has been since John F. Kennedy.  What made Barack Obama so scary to the Washington establishment was that he was, in fact, a new kind of leader, and brought a new kind of politician with him to Washington.  Former opponents like Hillary Clinton, Tom Vilsack, and Joe Biden were scattered throughout his cabinet.  New leaders such as Al Franken and Donna Edwards emerged as freshmen in that 2008 class, and we had sixty U.S. senators, along with a mammoth 257 House seats to rely upon.  We held 29 governor's mansions on that Election Night.  This was the recipe for change, and all President Obama needed was us to be able to sustain it longer than just one night in November six years ago.

And that's the great disappointment of 2010 and 2014, and why we as Democrats and one-time Obama-supporters are partially to blame for what went down.  We didn't fight back hard enough when lies were spread about birth certificates and the Affordable Care Act.  We didn't show up in great enough numbers to help the people who put their careers on the line to pass worthy but politically risky bills.  We watched progressive icons like Russ Feingold and Jim Oberstar go down in flames, and watched as a bolstered Democratic Party in 2012 ran scared, finding that people's devotion to Obama was just that, and not a devotion to the men and women who made his policy a reality.

That is the big sting of the 2014 Midterms for progressives like myself.  It isn't just that we lost-it's that we lost all of those people who were willing to make a difference.  People like Kay Hagan and Mark Pryor stuck their necks out to get healthcare to millions of Americans, despite it being demonized by the Right.  People like Mark Udall and Bruce Braley fought incredibly hard against the Koch Brothers and their plans to deregulate environmental laws.  We frequently complain about what President Obama can't get done, but when we don't give him the tools he needs and the leaders he needs to win battles on Capitol Hill, what do you expect?  We claim to remember the lessons of past elections, but we watched as 2014 became a near carbon copy of the 2010 Midterms, and we further handed over Obama states and districts in places like Iowa, Nevada, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Wisconsin to the GOP.  We pass minimum wage laws within our own states, but don't elect people who can bring that change across the country.

It's particularly tragic because, as much as I truly admire and respect Hillary Clinton, she's not going to be to 2016 what Senator Obama was to America in 2008.  She might carry out some of his policies, but she's not a change from the status quo.  She's not going to inspire a generation of voters to pick up and try to make their government different.  It might be Barack Obama's fault for not sticking his neck out harder in 2010, 2012, and 2014 to get more allies in Congress, but it's hard not to see that fault in ourselves when you look at the results of last Tuesday.  Progressives want and desire hope and change, and we truly believe that you can make the world a better, fairer place with laws that demand equality, fairness, and an equal shot at the American dream.  But when we pin all those hopes on one man and one election, and do not have the foresight to see that hope and change demand us to pick up the ballots for senators and governors and legislators and mayors, and do not have the patience to understand that change requires a movement across multiple elections, then we lose.  Barack Obama was an amazing catalyst for American progressives to start to think differently, but he was never meant to be the only spark in that movement, and when we ignore how our own legislators and politicians contribute to that movement, Barack Obama becomes only a symbol, and not an agent of change.

Six years ago I wasn't sold on President Obama's message, but voted for it anyway because I was afraid of the alternative.  Today, I find that that message was truly one we all were hungry to have enacted, but didn't have the patience, trust, pragmatism, and determination to help him turn "yes we can" into "yes we did."