THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
JASON REED/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
former head of the Republican National Committee.
Van Jones, a former White
House official whose background
in grassroots organizing gave him
a different perspective from those
of officials who’d come from the
Clinton administration, summed
up the consternation felt by many
Obama supporters.
“Who killed the hope?” Jones
wondered. “And what happened?”
“OUT-MARCHED
BY THE RIGHT”
Once in office, the soaring rhetoric
of the election quickly gave way to
legislative realities. Obama, as his
top adviser David Axelrod noted in
an interview, had pledged to “find
HUFFINGTON 09.09.12
Obama, pictured
with Joe Biden
and Nancy
Pelosi, endorses
his health care
initiative during
a joint session
of Congress
in 2009.
and form coalitions” as president.
Not doing so once in office would
constitute a broken promise in its
own right. But promising to pursue
an era of post-partisanship and
actually getting lawmakers to buy
into the concept were two very different things.
“It is sometimes blithely said,
‘You had the White House and
the House and after [Arlen] Specter [switched parties] you had a
filibuster-proof majority [in the
Senate]. Why didn’t you go more
visionary?’” said Jared Bernstein,
Vice President Biden’s former top
economic adviser. “That’s an extremely un-nuanced view of the reality. There were numerous Democrats whose vision was far from
aligned with ours.”
Addressing the challenges
brought about by the recession also