Has President Obama Forgotten why he won, or have we?

By David Sforza

In 2008, then Senator Barack Obama won a tireless campaign for the presidency, first beating out Senator Hillary Clinton and then Senator John McCain. To contrast himself from Clinton, he described himself as someone who would not play political games, who will reach across the aisle and work with Republicans for common sense solutions. He argued that Clinton was a polarizing figure, and would not be able to get the necessary work done. When he ran against McCain, he tapped the anger of the American public against Bush. He tied McCain to Bush’s economic policies and foreign policy. The sentence that killed McCain was that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
Today no one feels more disenfranchised about President Obama than his own base. They were disappointed in President Obama’s healthcare bill. They hoped Don’t Ask Don’t Tell would be repealed, but more importantly, they wanted the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy gone.
Yet his base also forgot another important part of the Obama Candidacy, his campaign against Clinton. Sure his supporters knew where he stood against McCain, but the reason they supported Obama over Hillary is because they wanted change in Washington. His supporters wanted to get rid of gridlock in congress and have less divisive exchange. They were sick of the partisanship of both parties, and Clinton represented the partisanship of the Democratic Party.
Obama tried bipartisanship from the start. He compromised on the Stimulus package to get Republican Senators Specter, Snowe and Collins to vote for it. He even got Specter to switch parties. Over the summer he urged Democratic Senator Max Baucus try hard to get a Republican vote on health care, and succeeded in getting Snowe to vote for the Baucus bill (she ultimately voted against the final bill). If you want to take a single look at why the healthcare debate lasted so long, you have to look no further than the summer long debate that occurred in Baucus’s Committee. Obama eventually dropped the Public Option just to make sure he could get his own party to vote for the bill, but he got everything else that he promised in the 2008 campaign and more. In fact, in contrast to his campaign, he is now mandating health insurance for all, something he did not promise in 2008 and attacked Clinton for.
And yet for all of these compromises, the liberals that chose Obama over Clinton are upset. As someone who voted for Clinton, I ask his base this: what part of reach across the aisle did you not understand? What part of ending the partisan divide did you not understand? Where were you on November of 2010 when the Democrats desperately needed your vote? None of Obama’s compromises come at a surprise, as Obama clearly stated that he would attempt to reach across to Republicans to get ideas through to change Washington.
The Republicans decided to exploit Obama’s promise. They pushed for concessions, and then would ultimately vote against the bills. They continued to be decisive and uncooperative. And worse, Obama never put up a fight to defend himself or attack the Republicans for not even attempting to work with the Democrats. The Republicans knew a major part of Obama’s base voted for him because of bipartisanship, a promise they could make sure Obama would not be able to keep.
So where are we now? The Republicans have taken back the House and now hold the largest majority they have ever had. They have destroyed the Democrats super majority in the Senate, winning in states that have voted for Democrats for decades. Keep in mind 2004 was not a winning year for the Democrats, so the senators that lost in 2010 were ones that were safe six years ago. Many of them had served multiple terms. In 2012, many of the Democrats up for reelection will be going for their second term, and many of them one by razor thin margins the first time around.
So what is President Obama to do? In the first major issue the Democrats and Republicans faced with a new congress coming, Obama decided to be bipartisan. In order to save unemployment insurance and tax cuts for the middle class and mall businesses, including additional tax cuts from his stimulus package, he decided to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years, making the tax cuts once again a major campaign issue in 2012.
Obama did this for two reasons, he needed to show that he can keep his promise for bipartisanship, and he needed to pass a bill that would actually stimulate the economy. Obama only hopes that in 2012 he can come out and say that he tried to be bipartisan. In order to get Republicans to help the middle class and unemployed he needed to extend the Bush tax cuts. In other words, the Republicans compromise was helping the middle class when they did not want to.
But this is the compromise where Obama failed. Sure he beat Clinton for her partisanship, but he beat McCain because of Bush economics. In fact, if you could point to one promise throughout his entire campaign it was this: the tax cuts for people making more than 250,000 dollars a year will expire. He bashed McCain over the head with it, and used it as a prime example on how Republican economics favored the rich at the expense of everyone else.
We wanted compromise, we wanted congress to work together, we wanted a healthcare bill that would insure most Americans if not all Americans, we wanted to regulate the banks and make them pay back the TARP dollars, and we wanted to drastically scale back the war in Iraq and focus more on Afghanistan. And to this, Obama succeeded, and yet his base has forgotten that they even asked for him to do these things.
But extending the Bush tax cuts takes all the wind out of Obama’s sail. Sure the compromises that he made were necessary for bipartisanship, and ultimately the deal he got was probably the deal he was going to get. But he did not fight for it. Obama lost his mojo, and caved on his number one campaign promise. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire was the way he was going to pay for everything he promised us. Up until this point the people who voted for Obama had nothing to complain about, as he did almost everything he promised to do. We have forgotten why we voted for President Obama, but today, he forgot why we voted for him.