The Reason For The Enthusiasm Gap

The New York Times:

Democrats also have a limited amount of time left to persuade the nation to let them hold the White House and increase their position in Congress. If they don’t start talking about their fundamental principles, going beyond the easy sound bites, they will lose voters who are hoping for more.

What happened to the enthusiasm for Obama that propelled him into the white house four years ago? It's not that he has failed in many important ways to live up to his promised change we can believe in. Voters including Obama's former young enthusiastic supporters do not fault him for failing, they have lost enthusiasm for him because he didn't even try. He didn't even try for single payer health care. He didn't even try to deliver on his promise of transparency. He let Wall Street crooks off the hook; none have gone to jail for the excesses that caused our current economic malaise. He sent more American kids to Afghanistan to die instead of ending the war. In his eagerness to compromise with the Republican pigs in Congress, he offered to give away the store and sell out seniors, the middle class and the poor. That got him nowhere because the greedy social Darwinist Republicans cannot be satisfied until they have returned us to the obscene economic excesses not seen here since the nineteenth century. So now Obama finds himself needing to re-energize his base in a way that George W. Bush never had to. That's because Bush actually followed through on his promises to his base. So now the New York Times has it right: Obama and the Democrats had better start trumpeting their principles especially if they have any hope of re-capturing some of that lost enthusiasm from 2008. And this president needs to acknowledge his mistakes and re-assure Americans that he will be a more principled leader during the next four years.