As The Eternal Pie Fight of 2011 rages on, I think both sides are starting to understand that both sides exist, and are going to exist until at least 2017.
Since that's so, I'd like to start figuring out how the Progressive movement coexists within the Democratic Party with the pro-Obama folks, and how we can spend our energy productively going forward.
First, some definitions: The Obama Faction is the group of people who:
1) Support President Obama unreservedly, and
2) View full-throated support of President Obama as necessary for membership in the Democratic Party
(1) is not a big deal. This Big Tent had room to nominate Joe Lieberman as Vice President; it can live with another DLC pro-business left-hating Dem.
(2) is the origin of the pie fights on Daily Kos and represents a major challenge for Progressives going forward.
Progressives are, by and large, issue-oriented. We are criticized for being quick to throw our former allies under the bus, but on the other hand, we're rarely punked for long by charismatic liars. To Progressives, Bush and Obama are measures in a long symphony that begins with trust-busting in the 1890s.
One pro-Obama narrative is that Bush and the 2000 Republicans represent some kind of unusual combination of events, and Obama, by virtue of his biography, is believed to be a sort of uncorruptable paladin, slowly hacking through the mess left behind by the extraordinary alliance of the Establishment Media and racist GOP, beset on all sides by enemies from the right, center, and left.
The other pro-Obama narrative, which is completely inconsistent with the narrative above, is that Obama was always a center-right economic conservative who ran on Reagan's economic and social policies. In this narrative, those policies were not particularly disastrous, so it's hardly surprising that our leaders want them. In addition, it is simply not allowed in our current media environment to speak outside of them and be taken seriously.
Most pro-Obama arguments oscillate freely between these two narratives; this is why they are so infuriating to Progressives who expect some level of coherence and intellectual honesty in their discussions. The most common form of oscillation is to claim that first one, and then the other, is the "true" Obama, while the other is his front to maintain the power he needs to make America super-awesome eventually.
The Progressive narrative is a little different. It states that Obama owes his electoral success to adoption of Progressive memes, and that his Presidency has had policy success when it has supported those ideas vigorously. And vice versa -- that Obama's terrible failures have come from rejecting those ideas. So, for example, Obama's intervention to save GM, his stimulus package, and ending DADT have all reaped rewards. Meanwhile, his trimming of the stimulus package, the lies during the Summer of Recovery, and his nation building ambitions in Afghanistan have led to ongoing failure. Keynesianism works and Reaganism fails. Inclusiveness works and colonialism, however well-intentioned, fails.
Fundamentally, we as Progressives are going to have to understand a few things from all of this:
1) We are a faction in the Democratic Party. We are, in fact, the faction which binds the coalition together. But we are not the Party. Our allies do not always agree with us.
2) President Obama is not a Progressive; he's a neoliberal who has adopted Progressive ways of speaking in order to attract a larger portion of the Democratic coalition to his side. Once we were no longer useful, he discarded us.
3) Our interactions with Obama supporters need to change from demanding the impossible (that they be willing to put real pressure on Obama from a policy standpoint) to demanding the necessary (that they acknowledge the existence of a time period starting in 2017, and that they put up with the existence of Democrats who are not fond of their preferred candidates).
4) The Democratic brand is going to be savaged by Obama's neoliberalism and his failure to combat the Great Recession (Lesser Depression). We will need to find and promote leaders who are willing to reinvigorate the brand. We have two models: the Teabaggers/Christian Right and their four-decade climb to power in the GOP, and the Progressive Party's split from the Republicans and eventual co-option by FDR. They are, sadly, completely opposite.
Obama has chosen a failed Presidency. There is nothing anyone here can do about that, especially not Progressives, whom he seems to have a personal animus for. Let's hold our noses, vote, and look elsewhere for means of pursuing our goals of a prosperous, healthy, and sustainable home here in the United States.