How the Left is Letting Obama Down

There's a palpable sense among among many liberals that Barack Obama is not turning out to be the progressive they'd hoped. John Judis had a great piece last week in the New Republic explaining one of the reasons why. While there are a host of conservative organizations and forces in the culture to apply pressure on him and on Congress, there are very few comparable liberal ones. So, every time a policy is developed, their voices are louder.

It makes sense to me. Remember that during the Depression, what pushed FDR to the left was the fact that the largest political force in the country at the time was Huey Long's "Share the Wealth" movement. There was a great fear everywhere that the net political result of the Depression would be a Marxist push to the Left all over the world. Responding to that, politicians tried to co-opt the Left with their policies.

There's nothing like that now. And, the result, as writers such as The Huffington Post'sTom Edsall and Joel Kotkin have pointed out, is that Obama is producing a set of policies that tend to benefit the upper middle class more than the poor.