An Impossible Crowd, Forget Tough

The most striking thing about the President's speech yesterday was the number of people on the left who had A) been complaining that the President had not yet taken the opportunity to give a fiery populist speech espousing the values of the Occupy movement, and B) when the President actually did that yesterday, they then said the President's speech was virtually meaningless.

Taylor Marsh is a classic example of this, having made up her mind before the speech yesterday that the President's hand had been forced by the Occupy movement, and that she was completely uninterested in what he had to say.

The patter is “Obama channels Teddy Roosevelt,” but that’s not quite right. What Pres. Obama is doing is channeling Occupy Wall Street and all the Occupy movements across the country, hoping to blast your message wide while simultaneously attaching himself to it, but without you getting credit for it.

It’s as clever as it is dishonest, a political master stroke by Obama reelect that is so cynical it could only come from one of the two big corporate, Wall Street parties.

That's a hallmark I've found of the Professional Left, the media folks who make a living by attacking the President with assaults ranging from "not progressive enough" to "worse than Bush."  Marsh is the archetype for one mode of the Professional Left, the Disillusioned Hillary Clinton Voter.  They've never forgiven Barack Obama for beating Hillary in the primaries in 2008, and insist that the country would be infinitely better off with Hillary at the helm, fighting for "real progressive values".  Marsh's book, The Hillary Effect, is a long treatise on how Clinton is the only real progressive leader.

The most odious feature of this mindset is a relentless belief that Barack Obama is the least qualified human being on Earth to be President of the United States, a disdain bordering on pure hatred, something you'd expect to find in the most rabid Tea Party operative.  Marsh displays this contempt for the President openly in a piece from last month.

I’m not disappointed in Pres. Obama for not being a more progressive leader, because I knew he wasn’t a progressive from the start.

It’s also not disappointing that Pres. Obama has made the Democratic Party more like the Republican Party through his continual leaning to the right, because both parties are basically the same these days, though the Republican right’s crazy is more virulent, while the Democratic left is just feckless.

I’m not disappointed Pres. Obama didn’t get a primary challenger, because you’d have to be nuts to go up against a man so thoroughly bought and paid for by Wall Street and big business.

She's not disappointed you see, because she never had a very high opinion of President Obama in the first place.  She had made up her mind that he was a failure before he took office, a failure born of his theft of the Presidency from Hillary Clinton.  She manages to remember to breathe at some point while writing this and throws in a half-hearted "Pres. Obama is better than the current leading alternative on the Republican side, which today is Newt Gingrich" but then bemoans how awful that truly is.

There's also more to it than just irrational hatred bordering on "becoming the monster you wish to defeat" as she consistently displays open derision for the President, but discussion of that particular demon on the left always seems to lead to a lot of trouble.  That always brings up a political cartoon I remember seeing just after Obama's election in 2008 where a young black boy and a white girl are playing on a swing set, and the black boy says "Do you know what it's like to finally have a President who looks like me?"

The white girl of course says "No."

Some people have never gotten past that.