My Harvard classmate Lucia Brawley is an exceptionally talented actress based in LA. She was also an enthusiastic organizer for Barack Obama in Hollywood in 2008, and maxed out to his campaign. She’s volunteering to coordinate the Obama campaign in “Obamawood” again for 2012.
Yet like many Obama supporters today, Lucia’s feeling, and voicing, serious concerns about whether her president is “fighting” hard enough.
Lucia has posted an open letter at her Huffington Post blog, a crie de coeur in which she recalls her passion for the President:
You seemed to have appeared like a God-given antidote to the tenor and the policies of the George W. Bush administration…I met the man who would become the father of my child at a fundraiser for your campaign…I had total faith in your assured victory, even when you lagged 20 points behind Hillary.
And yet Lucia is frustrated. Not just with the “Tea Party’s treasonous brinksmanship with the U.S. debt ceiling,” which she believes “has led to our first credit rating downgrade in history.” She’s also frustrated at what she calls Obama’s tendency to compromise:
Giving away revenues, not establishing a jobs program, not repealing the Bush tax cuts, leaving Wall Street criminals untouched, allowing unions to be busted without much fanfare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to be up for grabs, bargaining away graduate student loans, disowning your great achievement of health care (Obamacare? Yeah, that’s right: Obama cares), negotiating against yourself, succumbing to bullies…
Lucia vows that she will keep on fighting for Obama–but she first wants to know if he’ll fight for her and her family. “Because if not you, then who?”
In spite of my substantive disagreement with Lucia on all of the above (I’m not guilty of treason, for a start), it’s hard not to feel sympathy for her and others who are realizing their god has failed.
The hurt is everywhere. Liberals are posting Drew Westen’s recent New York Times essay all over Facebook, for example, echoing his outrage that Obama has chosen “the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.”
There have been numerous, hair-pulling articles in recent days: E.J. Dionne’s attack on “centrism” in the Washington Post; Paul Krugman’s similar assault in the Times, and so on.
President Obama stands accused by his left-wing base of being too weak in the debt ceiling negotiations, of playing to the mythical political center, of allowing Tea Party terrorists to hold the country hostage while he attempts transformative bipartisanship.
Yet the meme that Obama doesn’t fight is old, and untrue.
When Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) led the presidential race in early September 2008–after Gov. Sarah Palin joined the ticket–Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times: “Somebody needs to tell Obama that if he wants the chance to calmly answer the phone at 3 a.m. in the White House, he is going to need to start slamming down some phones at 3 p.m. along the campaign trail.”
Obama won–not because he fought harder, but because he was able to take advantage of economic circumstances we are, sadly, re-living today.
Republicans on the receiving end know that Obama fights as hard as anyone can–harder than any president should. In fact, that’s the problem–he’s fighting when he should be leading. He’s losing because he’s defending bad policies. And if he fights harder–and divides our country more–he will continue to fail.
Obama’s fight is not with Republicans. It is with reality. The United States government cannot keep spending money it does not have. It cannot tax its citizens more to obtain that money, because then it will stop the economic growth that creates that wealth in the first place.
The Tea Party representatives who twice passed budget proposals that would have prevented a credit downgrade have been sounding an alarm–one that is long overdue.
Democrats are losing the debate because they won’t listen to that alarm. Insisting that “America is not broke,” they are attacking the opposition, the ratings agencies, and now President Obama himself. They are making a mistake.
Lucia wants Obama to fight harder–but I know that if I wanted Obama to be re-elected as much as she does, I’d be urging him to seek a bigger, bolder, and better compromise when negotiations resume in Washington.
Comment count on this article reflects comments made on Breitbart.com and Facebook. Visit Breitbart's Facebook Page.