ANGRY LEFTISTS

Posted at 7:58 p.m ET

Angry leftists?  Yes, I know.  As Mark Twain said, "I repeat myself." 

And now the anger is growing...at Barack Obama.  It seems the political left is disappointed that he isn't behaving like a trained seal.  He isn't following the line.  Both The The New York Times and the Politico have pieces today on how crushed the wine and Brie crowd is by the performance of the president elect thus far.  They were expecting, maybe, Lenin?

One problem with pieces like this is that they refer to these battalions as liberals, or, sometimes, progressives.  But terms like that have lost their meaning.  The typical "liberal" of today is far to the left of where typical liberals were in the Jack Kennedy days.  As far as "progressive" is concerned, when you see Katrina vanden Heuvel referred to that way, you know the word has disappeared from any respectable dictionary.  The Politico:

Liberals are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices...

...“He has confirmed what our suspicions were by surrounding himself with a centrist to right cabinet. But we do hope that before it's all over we can get at least one authentic progressive appointment,” said Tim Carpenter, national director of the Progressive Democrats of America.

Whoops.  There's the "P" word.  I'd love to know if this crowd thinks we should ever buy any tanks.

The central premise of the left’s criticism is direct – don’t bite the hand that feeds, Mr. President-elect. The Internet that helped him so much during the election is lighting up with irritation and critiques.

At least The Politico refers to "the left."  That's progress.  As to the criticism, when will the left understand that it never elected Obama?  Obama was elected because he appealed, honestly or not, to the broad middle, which is where elections are won.  Senator McCain got 46 percent of the vote.  Without the middle, Obama would have been toast. 

“Why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s cabinet who will be advising him from the left?” asked Chris Bowers on his site, OpenLeft .com. Kevin Drum, writing on the Web site of the liberal magazine Mother Jones, echoed that sentiment: “I mean, that is why most of us voted for him, right?”

Yeah, man, hey, you know.  Well, let's see, Obama has Tom Daschle in his cabinet, and that well-known right winger, Hillary Clinton.  His attorney general designate, Eric Holder, has not been known to read neo-con manuals by candlelight.  In fact, Obama will get advice from the left, but it may not be the far, Stalin-was-misunderstood left.  There's the rub.

In an opinion article for The Washington Post on Sunday, David Corn, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, wrote that “progressives are — depending on whom you ask — disappointed, irritated or fit to be tied.” But he added that “there’s no rebellion yet at hand” and “I’m not yet reaching for a pitchfork” because the left still is hoping that Mr. Obama will hijack the establishment to advance liberal causes.

As FDR liked to say, I love it, I love it, I love it.  Don't you just love phrases like "hijack the establishment"?  Welcome back to the sixties.

“We assume that there will be a philosophical balance when we’re all through with this,” said Representative Lynn Woolsey of California.

Wooly Woolsey, as she's sometimes called, is one of the doctrinaire "progressives" of the California delegation, and we hope she's wrong.

By the way, the New York Times piece on the same subject is here.

December 8, 2008.