"Liberals analyze their Obama 'despair'"

Abby Phillip (Politico):

Borosage says that over the past 18 months, progressives have learned the hard way that they need to be more independent of the White House to realize the change that they are seeking.

The remedy for the problems that progressives face, Borosage says, lies in the need to create an equal and opposite force that can rival the enthusiasm of the tea party movement.

“If there is a progressive movement that is demanding change, driving the debate, challenging conservative Democrats and Republicans and challenging the White House, you might see a bolder agenda,” he says. “But it’s equally possible that this reform moment … that we miss it and conservatives come back with the same ideas they had when they drove us off a cliff.”

“It was always naive to expect a president to start a movement,” says Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor and co-editor of the liberal magazine, Dissent. “It’s a little bit like expecting a chief executive to start a union.” MORE...

Howie P.S.: H/t to Unjin Lee. Alterman ends his essay with a similar conclusion:

Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012—a pretty strong bet, I'd say—he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental "change" that is not possible in today's environment. This would be consistent with FDR's strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.

To borrow from Hillel the Elder: "If not now, when? If not us, who?"

More back and forth on this topic this morning from Atrios and his legions of commenters.