Who Needs to Step Up?

Mike Tomasky and Dave Roberts both have good items out today taking issue with progressives (Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Bill McKibben) who are lashing out at Obama for not using more “political capital” or “stepping up” to force moderate senators to be more progressive somehow. I basically agree with both of them, but I think Tomasky veers a bit too far in the direction of political fatalism. What Roberts says here is right though:

Yes: political realities can be changed. The kind of broad grassroots movement that Bill McKibben himself has been so instrumental in creating can shift the tectonic plates. But a crucial step in that process is to accurately identify what and who is blocking progress.

The crucial thing to remember is that Barack Obama didn’t emerge out of the ether with progressive policy proposals. Commitments to things like an aggressive carbon emissions target and a strong public option emerged over the course of a presidential primary campaign wherein activists affiliated with the environmental and labor movements created an incentive structure that led the main candidates to make those promises. It would be possible, in principle, to create a situation where Evan Bayh believes that there are more Indianians strongly committed to clean energy than there are Indianians strongly committed to making electricity as-cheap-as-possible for Indiana-based manufacturers. It would be possible, in principle, to create a situation where Jim Webb believes there are more Virginians strongly committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions than to preserving employment related to coal-extraction.

But someone would actually need to do the work. And it’s actually not the kind of thing that an incumbent president is well-positioned to do. The president isn’t powerless or beyond criticism. And on occasion—most clearly, I think, by setting a $900 billion maximum price tag on health reform in a big speech to congress—he really does do things that limit the options available to grassroots activists and persuaders. But in general, what’s needed is more persuading and more organizing by the kind of people who did the persuading and organizing that got us the Obama agenda in the first place.