I was very sad to read this piece written by Atrios.
My marker for Obama was whether he'd get a health care bill with a public option. He didn't. A year ago passage of some sort of health care reform seemed inevitable, and not a tremendous challenge. Only a year of dithering and bipartisaning and gangs of wankers and pre-compromising and, frankly, failure to put forward something simple and popular jeopardized it.
The bill's more good than bad, but it isn't what we should have gotten. It isn't what we voted for.
http://www.eschatonblog.com/...
Since Atrios (or his writings) and I were compadres for years, from 2002 through recently, and since I got into the netroots because of Atrios, back during late 2002 and early 2003 when the whole world had gone mad in the rush to war, and any deviations from the "MSM" party line were met with accusations of treason, his commentary saddened me to no end. Before, Atrios (as well as other bloggers), were an island of sanity. They, like me, wanted to pull an Elvis and their shoot their TV when the dark army of war-mongering pundit descended from their CNN and Network anchor crypts.
And, back then, Markos, rightfully, called The New Republic magazine, and their "I'm a liberal and even I support the war in Iraq" mentality harmful and captured by the politicians whom they sought to cover.
But then Obama got elected. And the netroots became deluded by a lack of reason. A lack of perspective. A lack of comprehension of the world as it is. In other words, they forgot that the appeal of the netroots was the appeal of facts and reality, as a opposed to the pie-in-the-sky unrealistic madness represented by my former-hero Atrios's claptrap above.
Today, this is reality, as represented by the former-Netroots' Bete Noir, the New Republic:
Historians will see this health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation. Obama and the Democrats managed to bring together most of the stakeholders and every single Senator in their party. The new law untangles the dysfunctionalities of the individual insurance market while fulfilling the political imperative of leaving the employer-provided system in place. Through determined advocacy, and against special interest opposition, they put into place numerous reforms to force efficiency into a wasteful system. They found hundreds of billions of dollars in payment offsets, a monumental task in itself. And they will bring economic and physical security to tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise risk seeing their lives torn apart. Health care experts for decades have bemoaned the impossibility of such reforms--the system is wasteful, but the very waste creates a powerful constituency for the status quo. Finally, the Democrats have begun to untangle the Gordian knot. It's a staggering political task and substantive achievement.
. . .
Obama's accomplishments do not, and probably will not, meet those of Johnson, let alone Franklin Roosevelt. It's worth noting that he has smaller majorities, and governs in an era when the republican Party is far more ideologically radical and unified in opposition. A measure of that greater discipline and partisan unity can be seen in the fact that Social Security and Medicare both won significant Republican support, and both were far more liberal and government-centric in their design.
We can't know what the future holds in store for Obama. It's entirely possible that Republicans will gain control of the House in November and block any further domestic progress, unemployment will stay high, and Republicans will win the White House in 2012. Yet he's already left his imprint on history.
http://www.tnr.com/...
The netroots (or certain segments of it) have left the reality based community and are operating in a fantasy plane where the rules of politics don't apply. I can't, and won't, follow them there. Instead, I will stay grounded and recognize the extraordinary accomplishments of those who took the world as it is was and worked within it to make a difference.