Now, given the new Republican majority in the House and the stronger GOP minority in the Senate, progressives are likely to be further disappointed over the next two years. And a more deeply discouraged Left is likely again to want to punish Democrats for not enacting a progressive agenda. Obama will be further criticized for not effectively using the Bully Pulpit.
Some on the Left will drift further away from the real world, dreaming of a parliamentary system where third parties can do some good, rather than America's winner-take-all system where third parties just siphon off votes from the closest political grouping as Green Party candidate Ralph Nader did in 2000, helping put George W. Bush in position to steal the White House from Al Gore.
Dissension and disillusionment, of course, fit neatly into the Republican strategy for regaining total control of the federal government in 2012.
But if the Left finally gets serious about investing in a media infrastructure that will talk regularly with the American people offering factual reporting as well as an honest debate about the nation's problems Obama and the Democrats might begin to feel a stiffening of their spines. This happened during Bush's second term with the brief rise of Air America Radio.
But there is little hope for changing the current political dynamic if most Americans only hear an endless repetition of Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" mantra.
The truth is that government, despite its many faults, is the only force strong enough to demand any accountability from corporate power. Weakened unions and isolated Individuals simply can't do it.
An effective progressive media could explain that what the Republicans, the Tea Partiers and the right-wing media are really offering is the subjugation of middle- and working-class Americans to giant multinational corporations -- achieved by hobbling, hamstringing and hog-tying the only possible champion for average folk, a democratized and energized government.
But that message barely exists in the current debate raging across the country, a discussion which the Right has framed as the need to rein in Big Government. The only question is to what degree.
The volume of money that the Right has poured into media also has tilted the mainstream press corps rightward, both to avoid harsh attacks from right-wing anti-journalism attack groups and to offer soft landings to journalists who lose their mainstream jobs. Ex-NPR commentator Juan Williams is not the only one who craves a $2 million parachute from Fox News.
I realize that many on the Left will dismiss even the possibility that anything even a robust media infrastructure challenging the propaganda from the Right will make the Democrats and the national press corps behave differently.
In this view, Obama and nearly all Democrats are themselves corporatists who only talk a mildly progressive game to capture some votes every election cycle. The vast majority of mainstream journalists are already deemed sell-outs.
There are surely reasons to believe those points. Some of Obama's miscalculations like the decision to retain George W. Bush's military high command, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates appear to have been self-inflicted wounds.
According to Bob Woodward's book, Obama's Wars, the incoming president acted on his own in convincing Gates to stay on, a decision that left Obama vulnerable to being mouse-trapped into an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, one of the key factors in the Left's anger and disillusionment. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Bush Holdovers Trapped Obama."]
Obama also allowed the health-care debate to drag on long past his initial timetable because of his quixotic quest for the support of Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins from Maine.
But the Left will never find out if there is a realistic political option within the Democratic Party if there is no commitment to building media and other messaging operations at both local and national levels to explain the value of progressive proposals.
And the hard reality is that other possible Left strategies from third parties to street protests to romantic notions of "revolution" have shown little or no promise either, in large part because progressives remain largely outside the national political debate.
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