Youthful Obama supporters from 08 “walking around like cattle hit with a stun gun”

Barack Obama Speaks to 75,000 at Portland Oregon Rally, May 19, 2008

 

Newsweek’s Michael Tomasky asks, “How can the president rev up and mobilize his demoralized liberal base?” That would be those folks who supported candidate Obama in 08 from the ranks of “African-Americans, educated white liberals, Latinos, young people, and union members.”

Um, Mr. Tomasky, some of us educated white liberals took a pass on Obama in the 08 primary and voted for Hillary Clinton – for a sampling, click here.

Anyway, Tomasky provides a couple of interesting insights and nuggets of information in his analysis of the hurdles Obama faces in campaign 2012, which, as we are repeatedly hearing, isn’t likely to be a rerun of the media-driven, euphoric stampede the last time around.

Instead, well, Tomasky is suggesting that the Obama camp use fear to get out the vote. Wonder how many of those supporters reeling as if they’ve been hit with a stun gun are going to buy that?  Here’s the scoop:

It was a rare confessional moment for Barack Obama. At a Miami fundraiser in mid-June, the president acknowledged that it’s “not as cool” as it was in 2008 to support him. It isn’t just a matter of fewer hip posters and viral videos. It’s a matter of votes. Rekindling the enthusiasm of African-Americans, educated white liberals, Latinos, young people, and union members—the Democratic Party’s most loyal and progressive members—will be a huge challenge. After all, you can only elect the first African-American president once, and the past two and a half years have deeply disappointed many liberals. “I know a lot of the kids who worked hard in 2008,” says Hodding Carter III, adviser to the last one-term Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) and now a professor at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. “They walk around like cattle who’ve been hit with stun guns between their eyes. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

Obama and his people have heard this sort of thing so often that they no longer bother to take umbrage. When I asked chief Obama reelection guru David Axelrod about this sense of disillusionment, he patiently ticked off a list of accomplishments: health-care reform, repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” financial regulatory reform, the drawdown from Iraq, student-loan reform. “Did we keep faith with the things that the president said he would do when he ran?” asks Axelrod. “There is a long list of things he said he’d do that we in fact did.”

It’s a solid inventory. But it’s countered by the undeniable reality that the country hasn’t noticeably moved in a more liberal direction (quite the opposite), and by the widely held perception among progressives that Obama will never wage fierce battle on behalf of liberal ideals. When I interviewed Justin Ruben, the executive director of MoveOn.org, whose 5 million members (many in swing states) must be revved up and mobilized if the president is to be reelected, he gave me four or five variants of the line “People need to feel like the president and the Democrats are really going to fight for their side.”

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