HuffPo laments: If only Obama had been more liberal in his first term

Barack Obama could have learned something from LBJ. As a candidate Obama promised to change the way Washington works and he rode a wave of global support into the White House. His first two years in office have repeatedly been compared to the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Society under Johnson, with historic achievements on health care, Wall Street reform and other domestic priorities.

But Obama’s first term has also left many of his supporters wondering whether those accomplishments could have been bigger in size, scope and impact. The health care reform legislation was built largely off a conservative model, with millions of people shuttled into the private market. The financial regulatory reform bill contained carve-outs for the private sector and is widely regarded as not far-reaching enough to curb some of the banking industry’s worst practices. The White House made little effort to push labor priorities like the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have granted workers more avenues to form unions. The Iraq war may have ended, but the war in Afghanistan heated up, with lingering confusion as to why troops remain there…

During the crafting of the stimulus bill in the winter of 2008 and 2009, for example, Obama’s top economic advisers started from the premise that there were limits to what was politically possible. When the incoming head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, suggested that $1.8 trillion was needed to fill the hole in the economy, Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers, rebuffed her, calling the figure impractical…

Meanwhile, the White House cut deals with some of health care reform’s traditional opponents in order to try to buy their support — or at least dull their criticisms. They assured private insurers that the final reform bill would have a large private-sector component. In exchange, AHIP, the insurance industry’s lobbying arm, kept their reservations quiet, albeit while secretly funnelling money to the Chamber of Commerce for its anti-health care reform ad campaign…

The outside game also helped progressives achieve other legislative victories that might have otherwise eluded them.