How the left rolls over for Obama

Of all the kooky conspiracies you’ve heard about President Obama, from the fanciful notion that he was born in Kenya to Glenn Beck’s deeply-held belief that he is a closet Marxist, I can guarantee that you’ve never heard my own pet theory, which is that Barack Obama is a sleeper agent dedicated to destroying the American left. This isn’t literally true, of course. But the president’s extraordinary ability to get liberals to abandon their convictions in exchange for symbolic gestures puts Bill Clinton to shame. It took the Republican drive for impeachment to convince the left that Clinton, a neoliberal who pursued a deregulating, decentralizing, and frankly conservative-friendly agenda, deserved their allegiance. Obama, in contrast, has pulled off the same feat by offering essentially neoconservative arguments with gentle caveats and uplifting historical homilies…

Only a handful of netroots progressives fully grasped the central importance of a strong public option in achieving the left’s real goals. Most other liberals marched in lockstep behind the president and Wall Street Democrats in the House and Senate. Let me emphasize that I was perfectly content to see the strong public option go down in flames. But that’s because I believe in a cheaper, more sustainable safety net approach to health reform that would force most Americans to pay more out of pocket for their care, not because I wanted big insurance companies to shed crocodile tears while reaping an enormous windfall at taxpayer expense.

Because the left has decided to line up behind this neutered reform, it is the left that will be discredited when the jury-rigged starts to crumble under the weight of cost growth and administrative nightmares.