Passion Play
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)
This isn’t good news:
They were once among President Obama’s most loyal supporters and a potent symbol of his political brand: voters of moderate means who dug deep for the candidate and his message of hope and change, sending him $10 or $25 or $50 every few weeks or months.
But in recent months, the frustration and disillusionment that have dragged down Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have crept into the ranks of his vaunted small-donor army, underscoring the challenges he faces as he seeks to rekindle grass-roots enthusiasm for his re-election bid.
In interviews with dozens of low-dollar contributors in the past two weeks, some said they were unhappy with what they viewed as Mr. Obama’s overly conciliatory approach to Congressional Republicans. Others cited what they saw as a lack of passion in the president, or said the sour economy had drained both their enthusiasm and their pocketbooks.
The Administration’s defenders would like to have you believe that all of these dispirited donors are only unhappy because bloggers like me told them to be unhappy, and that if we all clapped a little louder, everything would be just fine.
Those people are also fools. But more importantly, they insult the intelligence of all the unhappy donors and activists who helped elect the President in 2008 in the first place. You don’t need to be brainwashed by a blogger or journalist to think that the President has been too conciliatory and too dispassionate in his approach over the last two years. You just have to have been paying even a modicum of attention.
Hopefully the President’s new aggressive tone will help lift activist spirits; I’ve already seen the positive effects locally among the Democratic base. As horrible as a Republican Presidency would be, that knowledge alone won’t be enough to motivate the President’s 2008 donors. The President has to convince them that he himself has finally become convinced of the uselessness of attempting to negotiate in good faith and reconcile differences with an opposition that simply cannot and will not be appeased except by his own destruction.
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