The Left Threatens Obama

The Left agrees on certain assertions made by the Right: Obama is a fraud. Only they are just now seeing that, after toting up the list of betrayals they have incurred at Obama's hand. The article by Michael Brenner - excerpted below - is carried on huffingtonpost.com and makes the anger of the Left clear and palpable [emphasis is added by me]:

"The real Obama turns out to be very different from the Obama imagined by so many who projected their own hopes and needs onto a neophyte whose courage on issues never matched his audacity in pursuing personal ambition. That is as much the fault of naïve admirers as it is his. This concocted Messiah has neither message nor mission. A close look at what he says, resisting the dazzling rhetorical flourishes, should have revealed that early on. He is very much a man of his times: weak or absent convictions, dispassion about even grievous wrongs, incapacity for moral outrage, a ready assimilation of fads and fashions. And that man is someone who tips his hat to every form of authority he encounters; someone who believes deep down that the locus of American political sentiment lies well to the right of his own party's mainstream -- the territory occupied by the notorious Gang of Six; someone who imbibed the Reaganesque vision of America during his formative years in the 1980s; someone who has found in Ronald Reagan his inspired model -- as Obama himself said in a May 2008 interview.

What is to be done? Two things. First, no avoidance behavior. We are betrayed, we are beaten, we are bewildered. That's the inescapable reality. To have a large majority of Americans with us only makes the pill more bitter. Second, from now on be as ruthless and cold-blooded as they are -- the special interests, the 20 percent of Americans who form the phalanx of the radical Republican right, as the occupant of the White House who always puts himself first. The last is our main hope. Obama the self-serving egoist needs the votes of progressive and simply decent, responsible people to enjoy the personal gratification of being president for eight rather than only four years. He must be told in the bluntest way possible that if he acts as if Reagan's America is the true America, he will join the ignoble roll of one-termers and find himself nursing that delusion back in Chicago. In truth, he more likely would wind up as Chairman of Goldman Sachs or President of Harvard or a Supreme Court Justice. But he wants the White House. The one threat that can shake him is a credible threat that he won't get it unless he changes his ways. No appeals to conscience, no elaborate argumentation as to why reform at home and abroad best serves the national interest. Just simple electoral arithmetic."

Obama is threatened from every side at the moment, having seriously offended and abandoned nearly every previous constituency that declared him Messiah just 10 months ago. His response is to make more speeches - he's delivered 112 by some counts - because that is his one strong point: talking. And he seems to believe that his own perception of his personal charisma: that alone is enough to deliver the day. Michael Brenner demurs.

But is Brenner correct in thinking that all Obama needs is a strong Leftist tilting spine? Or has the middle of the road abandoned the Left as well as having abandoned Obama, the weak leader? Do we want the likes of Michael Brenner in complete charge of our health care... and how many actually ask that question? I'm betting that some of the middle-of-the-road independents do ask such things.