New York Magazine asks "When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?" In my opinion this is a MUST read!

Photo courtesy of The Obama Diary.

Courtesy of New York Magazine:

There are any number of arguments about things Obama did wrong. Some of them are completely misplaced, like blaming Obama for compromises that senators forced him to make. Many of them demand Obama do something he can’t do, like Maddow’s urging the administration to pass an energy bill through a special process called budget reconciliation—a great-sounding idea except for the fact that it’s against the rules of the Senate. Others castigate Obama for doing something he did not actually do at all (i.e., Drew Westen’s attention-grabbing, anguished New York Times essay assailing Obama for signing a budget deal with cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that were not actually in the budget in question). 

I spend a lot of time rebutting these arguments, and their proponents spend a lot of time calling me an Obama apologist. 

Some of the complaints are right, and despite being an Obama apologist, I’ve made quite a few of them myself. (The debt-ceiling hostage negotiations drove me to distraction.) But I don’t think any of the complaints—right, wrong, or ­otherwise—really explain why liberals are so depressed. 

Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

Much like the author of this piece, I to have found myself trying to defend this President against a tide of liberal dissatisfaction. It is, to be honest, exhausting.

However in this piece the reporter, Jonathon Chait, does the herculean task of explaining that liberals have a history of pining for a true progressive President, bitching about how non-liberal they are while in office, and then mythologizing their presidency years after they have left the White House.

Take a moment to read it and see if it helps to adequately explain WHY we are seeing so many progressives angrily turning their back on THIS President.