Obama's base doesn't want a "fiscal cliff" deal

Problem is, of the ones who care enough to pay attention between elections, those voters will be the last ones interested the type of compromise Obama will need to make to get Republican votes for tax hikes. “The big issue they are going to have to figure out with the list is that activists want to fight for issues they can believe in,” Eddie Vale, a spokesman for Protect Your Care, told The New York Times. “A call to cut a bipartisan deal — that’s not going to cut it.”

History and polling back up Vale’s analysis. The youth and minority voters that reelected Obama are far more liberal than the few remaining centrist Democrats in Congress. According to Pew, while 60 percent of Americans view socialism negatively, a plurality of Americans ages 18 to 29 (49 percent to 43 percent) and a majority of African-Americans (55 percent to 36 percent) view it positively. These groups appear to have have radicalized over just a few years. The small number of them who actually remain politically engaged between elections are the most radical, unlikely to be interested in any deal. As for the rest, they largely ignored Obama’s pleas when he asked them for help governing in his first term. His attempts to put his campaign organization’s sophisticated computer operation behind policies like Obamacare received a tepid response.