It comes down to best choices, and not just trying to make them, but why we make them.
When I voted for Obama, I knew that there would be compromises and failures ahead. No politician escapes them, because all good in this world is easier said than done. So, I didn't come into things expecting that instantly, all policy would shift a big giant step to the left.
But that's okay. I wanted a problem solver, not a miracle worker. Only a miracle worker could have taken a Congress full of badly compromised Democrats and obstructionist Republicans, and gotten everything Obama promised done.
The uncomfortable truth of Democracy is this: you, as an individual, do not have all that great an amount of power. You have influence, mainly. If that isn't enough for you, this system isn't going hand better to you unless you get rich and powerful yourself.
Ah, but if you resign yourself to being powerless, if you decide, in pride, that what you have isn't good enough, and therefore you're not going to accept that bad choice...
...well, you're going to be even more shit out of luck. Instead of having a candidate out there, you'll have a bunch of people you would like to see elected, who you would vote for, if only everybody else got their heads out of their asses and voted for them.
I've seen many people take this attitude, left, right, and center, and I haven't seen many of them get what they want. They excuse it by saying that someday people will see the light if they keep up the support. Maybe. Me, I don't count on people seeing light, there's precious little of that going on these days. I count on people on the other side putting up a fight even when it's killing them to do so. I count on politicians on our side, Obama included, being weighed down by real events so they can't just change policy on their whim.
Holding a politician accountable is hard work. That's why Republicans don't really do it. They play a game where one side is good, and the other side is evil, where all the decisions are a simple matter of picking good over evil. All their choices are easy. They know what they must do.
They also are in a big, spectacular mess because of that attitude. See, the complexity of the real world didn't go away when they simplified their choices, when they stopped recognizing where they might have conflicts. It just got pushed around. They find themselves defying and dismissing common sense because the alternative is admitting that they've lost, and being the good guys, they can't quit, they can't let themselves lose!
They've got their single issues they won't, they can't compromise on! They must win!
Sound familiar? Some of us imitate them, hoping to gain their ability to heedlessly ignore obstacles in the way of getting their policies carried out. The trouble is, there's a limit to how far you can escalate tensions before you start losing on their account.
The past few budget deals have been fiascoes, politically speaking. Each Republican legislator is hell-bent on proving his purity to his constituents. But not all constituents, even in the GOP, want the same things, and some safe, old-guard Republicans are looking at the choices their people are making and shaking their head, too. They've tried to purify their party, managed to make it self-identify as 69% conservative when we only self-identify as 38% liberal. But the political system is designed to wear down on blocks of special interests, of people who support a minority view, and reward those who put together a broader consensus.
Just look at the budget deal and the debt ceiling deal. Look at the collapse of the recent deal on the Payroll Tax Holiday. The Republicans regained the majority, but to do that, they hired on such inflexible dickheads and dickheadettes that in operational terms, their party's majority was basically two minorities that occasionally agreed, a conservative party, and a Right-of-Attila-the-Hun party. The folks to the right of Attila the Hun don't like any deal short of getting everything they want. Because of this, the party ends up having to go to Democrats to get their extra votes, to get anything passed, because they know getting things past Obama or the Senate requires their approval, and they won't approve the Attila the Hun policies.
Rather than strengthen the party, the Right Wing resurgence has split it, and also helped split the country away from the Republicans to a greater degree.
But they won't pay for that, if some people have their way.
I'm disappointed of what came after 2008, but when I look at what Obama does, and what his rival leaders in the GOP do, I find I still prefer Obama, not the least of which because they fear him, because they find his election to be such an unimaginable catastrophe. Would they do that if they felt smugly in control of him? No. While Obama's conceded some things, he's made plenty of decisions and gotten plenty of laws passed, despite everything, that have convinced them that he is practically the devil. They are truly alarmed and threatened by him! They're not joking!
Yet some people look at Obama's record, and want to get rid of him. Are they convinced they could do better? I don't know. But like some of those Republicans, these folks seem to care less about the ability of the party in general to execute actual policy in the here and now, and more about getting people to conform to what they want. Now many of the things that they want (we're talking the Democrats here) are things we genuinely need, policies that should be changed, etc.
But that aside, where and what's the path to getting that? To me, this is the critical question. I find it to be very irrational for us to throw away to means to get some things done, and prepare the way to do more, out of disgust and disappointment over not getting the ability or the chance to do everything. I find it even more irrational to exchange capability for the ability to dream things in good conscience, but minus the capability to actually do anything.
I've spent most of my life as a Democrat, about twelve years out of eighteen years that I 've been a supporter of the party, knowing my party had the better ideas, but not being able to do a damn thing about them.
The two years after 2008, regardless of their disappointments, were a magnificent time to be a Democrat, as far as I was concerned. The years after 2010 were none too pleasant. To put it quite simply, I believe that you have to build up, coalesce the political inertia, the weight of influence that allows you to push your party's policies.
The Republicans lost that in 2006, but they haven't yet realized just how little of it came back in 2010. We had something in 2008, but we let disappointment get the better of us as a nation, so we traded a bad situation for a worse one.
The question is, which party comes to its senses first? Which party realizes that resolving the difficulties of government, especialy in times like ours, where the legacy of bad government has become such a crushing weight, will be no easy task, and it will take patience, and a tolerance for non-ideal results to successfully slog through all the issues, all the problems we face now?
When are we going to stop causing ourselves pain by seeking out pain-free government that doesn't requires sacrifice or compromise on our part?