David Horsey: "Barack Obama in the land of disenchantment"

David Horsey (seattlepi.com):

A year ago, bundled up as if I was going skiing, I boarded a bus near National Cathedral and set off to witness history.

On that frigid, sunny day in Washington, D.C., I soon found myself among hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens gathering at the western front of the United States Capitol to see the first African American take the presidential oath.

It was record-breaking inaugural throng. People were packed together like refugees. Waiting lines were epic. Some people never got through security in time to see the swearing in. But everyone was uniformly joyful. There were no complaints, only relief that eight years of an unpopular presidency were finally over and something very different and exciting was about to begin.

Barack Obama, backed by strong Democratic majorities in Congress, was about to take America on a grand leap into a better future.

Or so it seemed on that dramatic day.

Now, just one year later, Massachusetts voters have given Teddy Kennedy's senate seat to a Republican conservative named Scott Brown and Congressional Democrats are running for cover.

Over the last 12 months, as folks on the reactionary right have become energized by tea party protests and reckless conspiracy theories promulgated by a legion of paranoid bloggers, many Democratic stalwarts who danced gleefully on inauguration day have become disenchanted with their president. Recently, an expression of this disenchantment arrived in my e-mail from Curt Pavola, an ex-city councilmember in Olympia, the state capitol of Washington. Pavola noted that he has worked in Democratic politics for decades and, in "An Open Letter to Barack Obama," said:

I voted for an energized, engaged movement for socio-political change in 2008� I think the nascent movement is not being supported, and it is failing. The Old Guard is still running our country.

I don't know that I'll even vote for president in 2012. You haven't earned my vote, and I do not vote for people who don't earn my vote� Unless I see successful leadership and dramatic public policy change at the national level, I'm done supporting Democrats in national elections. Do something significant, or go away.

What a difference a year makes.

Now, it could be argued that significant things have been done -- rescuing the national and world financial system from collapse, for instance. But Obama does not get much credit for this from anyone. The common, if overly simplistic, perception is that the rescue was nothing but mystifying high-level chicanery that bailed out Wall Street fat cats with the money of beleaguered taxpayers.

In politics, perception is everything. The perception of the Democratic Party's leftist base is that Obama is not all that different from his predecessor. Besides adopting the Bush approach to saving Wall Street, Obama has recommitted the country to the War in Afghanistan, has failed to close the Guantanamo prison and has not eliminated the military's anti-gay policies. Perhaps worst of all for the left, Obama, with the best opportunity in years to reform health care, allowed Congress to take the lead and concoct a Senate bill that liberals see as a gift to the insurance industry.

While the left-wing perceptions of Obama are framed by disappointments about real policy disputes, right-wing perceptions are the stuff of dark fantasy. For a year now, there has been an unrelenting drumbeat of fear � Obama is a socialist, Obama is a Nazi, Obama is a Muslim, Obama wants death panels, Obama intends to take away your health care, Obama is bringing in Interpol to spy on Americans and secret squads to drag patriots to internment camps.

For independent voters with only vague ideological leanings, all the negativity from the left and right has made many of them question their vote for Obama in 2008. Now, upset and impatient, this cohort swung their support to Scott Brown.

All of this adds up to a strange political landscape that looks like something out of Alice in Wonderland. We have Tea Party activists old enough to be enjoying the socialized medicine of Medicare who rant about a government takeover of health care. We have purist progressives sniping at the president for not being the scary left-winger the right-wingers perceive him to be. We have the Republican minority in Congress posing as champions of the common man while using procedural gimmicks to protect bankers and financiers from closer scrutiny, rich people from higher taxes and big corporations from environmental rules. And we have Congressional Democrats, with some of the largest majorities in history, acting as if they no longer have the power to do much of anything because they lost one Senate seat.

The only person who may have the ability to rationalize this situation is that very rational man sitting in the Oval Office. He may not have the political wiles of Lyndon Johnson or the empathetic aura of Bill Clinton, but the president is not without skills.

Barack Obama is the same man he was a year ago. He is the man who ran one of the most intelligent and innovative political campaigns in American history. He is the man who lifted the spirits of a majority of voters with inspiring words about how we are not a red America and a blue America, but the United States of America.

Even though partisans on the left don't like it and partisans on the right deny that it is true, Obama's instincts are to be conciliatory and centrist and that is exactly what people in the broad middle of American politics want. He can become their leader again.

Yes, he is fighting against a permanent and often rabid opposition, but Barack Obama is a smart guy. If he learns the right lessons from the struggles of his first year in office, there is a reasonable chance his next three years will confound his critics, both right and left, and come closer to fulfilling the hopes of inauguration day.