As a previous mid-level donor to Obama in 2008 (more than most donors but well short of the legal max), Obama for America/Organizing For America asked me to donate $100/month from now until the election. Now that is more than I planned to contribute to for 2012, but if I was really in love with Obama, I'd certainly consider it. At this point, I really don't plan to donate to OFA at all. I have been relatively prosperous the last few years so I could afford it, but I no longer feel as though a donation to help Obama be reelected is even close to as satisfying as donating to Elizabeth Warren's potential US Senate campaign or just making a tax deductible donation to a few charities and sitting out 2012.
I wrote back that I won't be donating any money to OFA because they have not delivered on policy objectives and have repeatedly and publicly heaped scorn on their own base as well as making back room deals with corporate interests that have taken the big progressive goals off the table and then publicly espouse support for those goals right up until the votes, when they admit that they were the very first thing Obama conceded in negotiations. See the Public Option for the prime example of this behavior which just serves to publicly humiliate the left or rather the center-left.
This President is center-right and I am on the far side of center-left and there are a lot of people way more liberal than myself on many issues. He has been behind not only his base but public opinion in general especially on economic issues but even on social issues, most of which don't really concern me as much.
Basically Obama has delivered only a handful of things:
1. DADT repeal (social issue that effects a relatively small number of people)
2. Minor student loan reform and pell grant expansion, small potatoes since it mostly saves the government a lot of money. It is a good-government issue, which has apparently become left-wing according to our corporate media but is hardly a major progressive victory.
3. A small step in the right direction on Health Care Reform in the form of the ACA but leaving out many of the crucial cost control issues (medicare drug price negotiation?) and either a public option or a medicare buy-in provision. Oh and it doesn't fully take effect until 2014 so either his successor from the GOP can wreck it or Obama himself can avoid accountability for its glaring shortcomings, and the unintended consequences likely to result from its unnecessary complexity (as compared to single-payer).
4. Dodd-Frank financial reform half measures, except for CFPA but lets face it, it will probably be toothless even under Obama.
5. Osama bin Laden dead. This would be enough for almost any Republican to get reelected but does not seem to count for much in the MMM when a Democrat is in the Oval Office.
Shortcomings:
1. Obama gave away the public option and Medicare drug negotiation and any meaningful cost control in the HCR negotations. The first two were overwhelmingly popular.
2. Dodd-Frank is likely to be only a fraction as effective as Glass-Steagal was, and reimplementing G-S was what was needed.
3. We are still 50k troops in Iraq and still asking to stay longer. It's still costing $43B/year. That is more than twice the NASA budget btw.
4. Afghanistan is a disaster and yet Obama is going to keep us there until Karzai himself starts shooting at our troops. Any idiot could think up about 100 things our country needs more than a "stable" Afghanistan for $113B/year. More than 10 years of funding NASA.
5. Extending budget busting Bush tax cuts as the price for the GOP not shutting down the government, ignoring the warnings from prominent Democrats and liberal commentators that the GOP would use the debt ceiling to hold the country hostage again, which of course they did.
6. Debt Ceiling negotiation in which Obama gave away the store to the GOP, despite holding a 14th Amendment trump card and a high likelihood of both court and public support for unilateral action to avoid a default. This Super-Committee is utter nonsense and will almost certainly deadlock or give the GOP everything it wants. The best thing possible from the progressive perspective and national interest is for it to deadlock entirely, resulting in both big predetermined defense and domestic discretionary cuts as well as the expiration of the whole swath of Bush tax cuts after 2012.
7. No Energy or Climate Change bill. I mostly blame Congress for this but Obama's embrace of conservative Democratic Senators, Blue Dogs (who mostly lost their seats anyway) and Lieberman cost us this and most other progressive goals in the first 2 years of Obama's term.
8. No labor reform, much needed on many levels including Employee Free Choice but basically our current set of nearly unenforced labor laws is so outdated and the fines are so low that employers generally ignore them without cost with a few narrow exceptions when the IRS gets tired of losing revenue for a few of them.
9. No jobs bill, no criminal prosecutions of bankers, stimulus too small, no breakup of the big banks, no meaningful foreclosure relief or housing reform, basically nothing ambitious. No major tax increases on the super-wealthy despite the top 1% holding 40% of the wealth now and 23% of after-tax income.
Nothing Ambitious: That would make a true slogan for Obama's first term. Change We are Still Waiting For? Change We Can Believe In (if you don't mind being fooled twice).
So if my vote is between a center-right Obama and a reactionary lunatic like Bachman the Idiot or Perry the Charlatan or just a right-wing oligarch like Romney the Liquidator, of course I will vote for Obama. I don't have to nor do I plan on sending him any money. He can go back to Wall St and Big Pharma and the other corporate profiteers for his campaign money, since those are the interests who are benefiting from his complete inaction on the need to rebalance this economy which is far too tilted in favor of big business and the super-rich.
I don't think Clinton would have been better. I never wanted her to be President. I feel like I made a seriously misjudgement in backing Obama so strongly. I guess I wanted Howard Dean with a silver tongue and what I got was George H. W. Bush with an aspiration to be like Herbert Hoover. I guess the bottom line is that I thought I was getting a transformational Presidency, an extraordinary man for extraordinary times and instead Obama is a transitional President, a compromise in chief, who knows that our economy is out of balance fundamentally but is unwilling to make the major reforms to bring us back to balance and set us on a path to widely shared prosperity.