President Barack Obama will never again have to face voters. Nothing he does will have to be calibrated for how it plays in swing states or with Independent voters. He is now governing solely for his own legacy. This is one reason I so opposed his reelection. Given his left-ward lunge in his first term, I shuddered to think where he would go in his second. An article today in Obama fan-zine Buzzfeed confirms my fears.
“I’m hopeful,” said Slama. “He’ll try to play to the middle, but he’s got the Tea Party to deal with, and he can take out his baseball bat and wail away and he won’t have to worry about the implications of reelection.”
With the election of progressive Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Obama’s longtime backers feel the liberal spirit inside the president could be unleashed: climate change, gun control, and immigration reform perhaps heading to the top of the agenda. (After, that is, the “fiscal cliff.”)
So, now we’re going to get the “baseball bat”? The sentiment in this article rings completely true to me. On a hot mic, Obama was overheard asking Russian President Medvedev for “flexibility” until after the election. There was rampant speculation about what exactly Obama meant by the plea. We’re about to find out.
To those 50% of American voters who opted to reelection President Obama, I say thank you. We’re about to witness what a truly progressive Administration, unafraid of reelection, looks like. Perhaps the full display of that will shake Americans out of their obsessive worries about birth control and abortion.
The “moderate” era of Obama is over. The progressive era begins today. I pray we survive it.
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