This is a response to the diary, "Don't call me a progressive."
First, I am a Progressive Democrat, not a liberal.
An old school definition of a progressive:
An amorphous, cross-party tendency towards economic and political reform prevalent in the United States especially from 1896 to 1916.
In that era Democrats, Republicans, and non-partisans alike became alarmed by developments in American life that had been under way for some time. They viewed with concern the rise of trusts—monopolies in commerce and industry—and the parallel emergence of party bosses and political machines. Such concentrations of economic and political power, so it was argued, not only led to exploitation and corruption, but also ran counter to the values of equality, individualism, and democracy upon which the country had been founded. Progressivism and its forerunner populism were responses to these concerns. Progressivism, while it drew strength from Populist agrarian protest, had its roots in the cities among the urban middle class...
Follow me below the fold please.
In some circles it has been touted that we, the progressives, or the liberals, or the bloggers were the cause of the loss of a solidly Democratic and safely Democratic U.S. Senate seat. Our grumbling, it is proposed gave the Republican party the knife to wield into the heart of that election.
It was our fault for wanting the President and the U.S. Senate to live up to promises like:
"We'll ensure that CEOs are not draining funds that should be advancing our recovery," Obama said, in his weekly radio/YouTube address airing Saturday morning. "And we will insist on unprecedented transparency, rigorous oversight and clear accountability, so taxpayers know how their money is being spent and whether it is achieving results."
--- A year later, and we wonder where is the unprecedented transparency, rigorous oversight and clear accountability?
Or we want the promise kept of,
Mr. Obama said during that campaign that he favored repealing the ["Don't Ask, Don't Tell"] law, and allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
---A year later, and we wonder why can gay's still not be treated equally in the military, when their blood flows just as red.
Or maybe we are at fault because we would like President Obama to keep his pledge regarding:
I have been entirely consistent in my position on health care. What I said, and I have said on the campaign trail this time, is if I were designing a system from scratch, I would set up a single-payer system because we could gain enormous efficiencies from it. Our medical care costs twice as much per capita as any other advanced nation.
But what I've also said is that given that half of the people are getting already employer-based health care, that it would be impractical for us to do so, which is why I put forward a plan that says anybody can get health care that is the same as the health care that I have as a member of Congress, similar to the plans that you and John have offered.
---Of course, we the base, the people who campaigned for him MUST have misunderstood that. Obviously it didn't mean a Public Option, and it certainly never meant that we should have a pathway towards a single-payer system.
Again we were mistaken when we heard candidate Obama say:
We do have a philosophical difference. John and yourself believe that if we do not mandate care -- if we don't force the government to get -- to -- if the government does not force taxpayers to buy health care, that we will penalize them in some fashion. I disagree with that because as I go around town hall meetings, I don't meet people who are trying to avoid getting health care; the problem is they can't afford it. The costs are too high. And so, as a consequence, we focus on reducing costs.
Now, this is a legitimate argument for us to have, but it's not true that I leave them out. Your premise is they won't buy it even if it's affordable. I disagree with that.
---But it was our fault for pointing this out when President Obama backed away from this position.
It must have also been our fault to read into solving problems regarding the greatest income inequality since the Gilded Era. It was our misunderstanding Obama when he said:
what we need to do is to raise the cap on the payroll tax so that wealthy individuals are paying a little bit more into the system right now. Somebody like Warren Buffet pays a fraction of 1 percent of his income in payroll tax whereas the majority of the audience here pays payroll tax on a hundred percent of their income, and I've said that was not fair.
---It obviously was our fault when we expected increases in Capital Gains tax. It obviously was our fault when we read into candidate Obama that people should pay their "fair share." It was our fault to want to see that the wealthy, who rely on this great nation to make their wealth, pay at least an equal percentage of taxes as the middle class.
So I absolutely disagree with the premise that, "it must have been our fault." Where was it our fault? Was it our fault for daring to hope? Was it our fault for daring to think that a person who talked and embodied the modern American Dream could do what he said he was going to do? Was it our fault because, instead of rolling over, we wanted to HELP the president to achieve these goals?
We sent letters to recalcitrant Congress-people and U.S. Senators. We showed up at town hall meetings to provide a voice for progressive policies. We spent time going door-to-door, and using our telephones to canvas for progressive goals.
If you were to notice that the U.S. Senate lead started slipping only after the Christmas Eve vote on Health-care. The U.S. Senate bill was a complete break on nearly everything that the U.S. President had vowed to on the campaign trail, and for the first year of his Presidency. When this happened it felt to me, like a knife to the heart. It felt, to me, like the final death of all of the hopes that I had had for change. It made me completely disillusioned.
I did not get this sense of disillusionment from other bloggers. I did not get it because I relied only on feeling, but not on what the person and the party had said. I became disillusioned because on election day 2008 I was so proud of what my country had done. We had dared to hope, and now it feels that hope is gone.