Kirk Caraway

He told them that he now has three "main enemies" - the Taliban, the United States and the international community.

"If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban," he fumed.

In the wake of the 2010 elections, Republicans and their conservative allies are forwarding the narrative that their success is due to "overreach" by President Barack Obama, that he and the Democrats tried to move the country too far to the left. 

It's an entertaining take on the events of this election season. Unfortunately, it's not true. When you get beyond the rhetoric and look at actual, verifiable facts, it shows that the opposite is true, that President Obama under-reached, over-promised and under-delivered. 

Conservatives point to the unpopularity of health care reform as Exhibit A in their argument for overreach. And certainly, if you look just look at favorable/unfavorable poll numbers, that's what you see. But if you dig deeper, you have multiple polls showing that a majority of Americans are either happy with the changes, or unhappy because they wanted to see them go further. Specifically, Obama caved on his promise of the "Public Option," and didn't even consider another popular approach, a Medicare-style single-payer system. This certainly drove down voter turnout from his 2008 supporters who were pushing for more change, and turned off by the inside dealing and political carnage of the health care debate. 

Another source of this overreaching narrative is the Stimulus bill. Republicans have turned the word Stimulus into a slur, and are battering Democrats with charges that it didn't create any jobs. But the events of the last 18 months have proven true the assertions made at the time by liberal economists like Paul Krugman that the stimulus needed to be much, much larger to really get the economy moving. While the Stimulus bill did help create about two million jobs, that's not enough to drop the unemployment numbers down to a level that voters would be happy with. 

If the Stimulus had created, say, five million jobs and the unemployment rate was under 8 percent and dropping, voters wouldn't have cared if it cost double what Obama asked for. Success matters.

Another buzzword that conservatives like to use to bash this administration is "Bailouts." And on this point, they may have a case that this was overreaching. However, their target as to the cause is misplaced. When you talk bailouts, the big item here is the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP. But what few Americans realize is that this bill was passed under George W. Bush, not Obama, and was created by Bush's economic team, and had many Republican supporters. Some of those same Republicans are more than happy to propagate this falsehood. 

Then let's look at all those other items Obama promised in 2008 that drew people to the polls. Don't Ask Don't Tell is still in place. Gitmo is still open. There's no new energy policy, no "Green Jobs" revolution, no movement on climate change legislation, no immigration reform, not much progress on education. Each of these items have groups of supporters who didn't vote this year in the numbers they did in 2008. 

Certainly President Obama deserves a share of the blame for his midterm election loses, because he chose not to follow the bold policies he campaigned on, and instead either watered them down or ignored them. One thing he is clearly not guilty of is overreaching. 

Here is a good video from Robert Reich, though I'm not sure I'm as optimistic that people will begin to put aside ideology and make the necessary changes:

Extending tax cuts for 98 percent of taxpayers with an election coming up in just over a month is such dead-simple politics that the worst middle school student government candidate gets it. But a big enough number of "Blue Dogs" are somehow scared that they'll be painted as, what, in favor of middle class tax cuts, and be attacked for that? Saying these Blue Dogs are as stupid as dogs would be an insult to dogs.

And my senator, Harry Reid, WTF? Did you take too many punches to the head in your boxing days? You are in a tight reelection race with a certified fruitcake who shouldn't be polling above 30 percent, and you punt on a sure-win issue like this?

I refuse to believe these people are this politically stupid. Not only do these tax cut extensions — leaving out the top 2 percent — have wide public approval, but they put the Republicans in an extremely tough spot where they might vote against them. The campaign commercials write themselves. "Candidate X voted against giving you a tax cut!" It's this kind of action that would go a long way in taking the steam out of the Tea Party crazies.

But instead, the Democrats seem determined to hand their opponents a club with which to get beat with. Now, the GOP can run ads saying, look, the Democrats won't extend the cuts because they are planning to raise your taxes by $3.9 trillion to pay for God-knows-what kind of socialistic government programs.

WTF are these people thinking?

There are some folks like Josh Marshall who talk about the "bitchslap theory of politics," where the Democrats are acting like abused spouses, walking on eggshells around their Republican opponents trying to keep from getting attacked again.

On the other hand, you have the folks who note that many of these Dems consider those $250,000-and-up crowd an important part of their base, and certainly a big source of campaign funds.

Or maybe it's that — despite all the partisan acrimony — what we really have are two wings of the same political party, both controlled and funded by basically the same people. After all, it was crystal clear that Sen. Max Baucus was sandbagging on the health care bill, and Sen. Chris Dodd was doing Wall Street a favor in trying to block Elizabeth Warren's appointment to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Those are just two examples of how Dems have worked to water down any real change.

But not putting the tax cuts to a vote before the election is just completely stupid. If you can't figure out the politics involved with this, you don't deserve to be in Congress.

There is a meme being circulated by your opponents that the problems plaguing this country are due to the "liberal overreach" of your policies. It may be a false meme, but it is fast becoming conventional wisdom. In 60 days, it will be set in stone.

And I hate to say it, but it's your fault.

During your campaign, you electrified the country, showing them a progressive vision for the future that a wide majority of people could believe in. You tirelessly promoted that vision, fighting back the attacks and smears, and you won.

Since then, things have gone downhill in terms of the public's perception of that vision. You seem to think that your job is sitting in a room with a bunch of smart people, coming up with policies for this nation. You are wrong. Your job is to sell those policies, to advance the vision, and communicate with the American people.

You are the president of the United States. You have the biggest megaphone in the country, yet you appear voiceless as your detractors denigrate you and your policies. When you look at polls that show larger and larger portions of the American public believe provable falsehoods, that means you are failing at your job.

When you actually compare your policies with those of the Republicans attacking you, your policies are overwhelmingly more popular. On the merits, you win. But you have let your opponents hijack the narrative, and they are busy trying to blame the problems caused by their past policies on you.

And it's not just those on the right that are the problem. Your core supporters are becoming wary of your leadership, because you seem not to fight very hard for the positions you campaigned on. You managed to get a health care reform bill passed, congrats. But a majority of people think it didn't go far enough. Perhaps you are correct that you couldn't have passed a better bill with the Congress that you have. But it appears to everyone that you didn't fight for a better bill, particularly the public option. The same thing happened with the stimulus, which you seem to now acknowledge was too small to turn this country around. But you didn't fight for better bills, so you have to own them, along with their flaws.

Then there's immigration reform, DADT, climate change, all have majority support, but you seem to not even fight for them. We need another jobs bill, but you don't seem interested.

Have you given up?

You have 60 days to turn this around. If you don't, you will have squandered the best opportunity in 70 years to point this country in a new direction. Essentially, your agenda and your presidency may come to an end in 60 days.

You have the power to do this. We know, because we have seen this before. Perhaps you despise the politicking that comes with your job. But that IS your job, first and foremost. We know you can do this, and do it well.

The next 60 days will tell us all a lot about who you are. Are you going to fight for the vision you sold us, or are you part of the Washington problem you said you wanted to solve?

It may be too late to turn the tables for the upcoming election. But if you don't at least try, then we'll know that what we saw out on the campaign trail in 2008 was not real.

Sixty days. Time is ticking. What are you going to do?