Obama Is The MOST PROGRESSIVE President That We Can Get In Our Current Political System

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11. rhetoric? bwahaha!

by and large, the winning rhetoric is the rhetoric with the most money behind it and therefore the rhetoric that gets repeated most often.

all big donors understand that the rhetoric is the crap you sell to the masses, but campaign donations, gained by promises and kept by executive, regulatory, and legislative (mis)deeds, are what win elections.

poppy bush's big backers didn't expect him to do anything about flag-burning or massachusetts recidivism.
shrub's big backers didn't expect him to do anything about gay marriage.

rhetoric is the dream, the fantasy that gets people to vote one way or the other, but governance is reality and that depends on compromise with other politicians with conflicting goals.

the fact of the matter is that, if you look at the flow of money, the republican party was DOOMED as far as presidential aspirations go in 2008 and obama (within reason) could have said just about anything and won. neither big money nor the little guy was going to stand for four more years of republicans in the white house. period.

but could he continue with that rhetoric while actually governing? that's a very different question. like most here, i'm annoyed that we didn't get to see if it would have worked or not. i suspect, though, that it would not have worked and that obama was pretty wise not to try.


that said, i pine for the days when the media and the politics and the power structure are such that a strongly liberal president can succeed in actual governance. it took decades to get into this mess, it will take decades to break out.