Ted Rall: Six Weeks After Reelection, Obama Sells Out Liberal Democrats!

After the election Kerry Eleveld wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled "Why Barack Obama Will Be a More Effective Liberal in His Second Term." "In response to their initial disappointment with the president's early performance, many progressives speculated that Obama was just waiting for a second term to be more liberal," he said. That was true. They were. Eleveld continued: "A more likely explanation is that Obama was just waiting for a second term to be more liberal," he said. That was true. They were. Eleveld continued: "A more likely explanation is that Obama was still finding his groove, figuring out which levers worked best for him in the context of governing the nation, and in some ways, he was still developing the courage of his convictions." That, it turns out, was false. He wasn't. You can't develop convictions that you don't have in the first place. It's hard to remember now, more than six weeks later,but there was once a time, six long weeks ago, when liberal Democrats who naively chose to ignore Obama's consistently conservative first term, his consistently conservative career in the Senate, and his consistently conservative pre politics career as a University of Chicago law professor, seriously believed that his reelection would lead to a progressive second term. "It's hard to remember now, more than six weeks later, but there was once a time, six long weeks ago, when liberal Democrats who naively chose to ignore Obama's consistently conservative first term, his consistently conservative career in the Senate, and his consistently career in the Senate, and his consistently conservative pre-politics career as a University of Chicago law professor, seriously believed that his reelection would lead to a progressive second term. "It's time for President Obama to assume the Roosevelt inspired mantle of muscular liberalism," Anthony Woods wrote in The Daily Beast. This is his moment. He only has to take it." It's his moment all right, and he's taking it, but when it comes to Obama, liberals are once again guilty of some major wishful thinking. Obama's economic policies are closer to Herbert Hoover than Franklin Roosevelt.