There are a few of us who are old enough to remember everyone in the Obama White House and in liberal media defending former president Barack Obama’s failures by insisting that he never had the power to do any of the big things he promised.
Those who pushed Obama to at least try to do what he promised were ridiculed by Ezra Klein as deranged believers in a “Green Lantern Theory” of the presidency. When Obama’s own grassroots supporters tried to help round up congressional votes for his promised populist policies like a public health insurance option, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, reportedly lambasted those supporters with epithets:
The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul.
“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants.
The Obama era’s “but Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller!” rotating villain game metastasized into the “but Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin!” rotating villain game of the Biden era — the latter punctuated with some new “but the parliamentarian!” excuses for inaction.
To be fair, former President Joe Biden rammed through Congress a much bigger stimulus package than Obama ever tried, and pockets of the Biden administration at the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Justice Department’s antitrust division did laudably exercise much more power to deliver than their Obama predecessors ever did. And yet, in his rhetoric and deference to norms, Biden himself did his own part to enshrine the overall idea of the powerless president as Democratic dogma.
I bring this all up not because I live eternally in the past, and not just because I’m still mad about what happened in the Obama years, and not because I still…
Auteur: David Sirota
