We’re in trouble now…
I was chatting with Harold Goldstein* a couple days ago. He, like many liberals, is sort of terrified that if Obama is successful at getting a liberal agenda passed, there will be a backlash, causing us to lose power.
This may be true. We liberals got our agenda passed in 1964 and “[lost] the south for a generation”. In 1932, we created a whole “New Deal”, which conservatives have been running against for 70 years.
The thing is, most of the Liberal Agenda is pretty popular. We’re offering people Health Care and an end to the war. If we can get just those 2 things, there can’t be a backlash powerful enough to actually matter. The point of “power” is not some mindless holding of the same, but rather it’s the ability to achieve things. Obama has the ability to achieve things that would really make the world a better place.
We should not fear the backlash. We should fear children dying because the richest country on Earth cannot properly allocate resources. If we save lives and lose elections, it’s a small price to pay…
*around my family, we call him “Uncle Harold”, since my father had the good sense to marry his sister a decade or so ago.