Leftwinger Laments: 'We've Let Obama Down'

The end of Hopenchange is already causing some soul-searching among the hard left zealots. Get a load of this drivel from someone named Clancy Sigal.

Both Barack Obama and I are Chicago boys, schooled in the tough-minded, arm-twisting don't-mess-with-me attitude of crushing rather than compromising with your unforgiving enemies. We are both products of machine politics, I from the west side's "rotten borough" 24th ward loyally turning out Democratic party majorities of almost, and sometimes exceeding, 100% ("Vote early, vote often!"), and Barack from a south side community-organising operation that got things done door-to-door, block by block.

In the 2008 election campaign President Obama's most important strategist was the Chicago fixer David Axelrod, a master of hard-knuckle progressive neighbourhood politics who had masterminded the re-election campaign of Chicago's first African American mayor Harold Washington. But after Obama's inauguration the new president appears to have muzzled Axelrod in favour of Rahm Emanuel, a ferociously combative, rightwing Democratic political assassin. The enforcer Emanuel has so far failed to enforce much of anything for Obama by way of decent legislation, and Axelrod is sidelined except as a mouthpiece.

Rahm Emanuel is a rightwing assassin?

Huh? What planet is this guy living on?

We on the American left – in a dysfunctional marriage with a bought-and-paid-for Democratic party, tamed by leechlike dependence on "non-profit" liberal foundations themselves funded by corporations, a women's movement obsessed by the abortion issue, a gay movement fixed on gay marriage – simply aren't up to the job. We have not backed up Obama with a serious antiwar movement (there isn't any), and our Big Labour is too weak to fight for itself, let alone for the rest of us. Grassroots activism still exists, but during the 2008 presidential campaign we slipped into the habit of allowing ourselves to be used purely as fundraising vehicles. Fundraising is no substitute for hell raising, as the Palin-loving Tea Baggers and Town Hallers are teaching us.

So nice of him to slip that teabagger line in there. No lefty meltdown is complete without it, apparently.

Obama came into office with a mandate for change. That should have been our signal not to sit back and wait for him to deliver but to mobilise to make sure he followed through. Instead, we relaxed our "Chicago muscle", the hard volunteer work that elected him. And I started my self-satisfying, ultimately pointless OBAMA BETRAYAL file.

Feel the heartache.