I have been saying for a long time now that President Obama is the world’s worst negotiator and has absolutely no interest in fighting for progressive principles. I didn’t make this up out of the whole cloth. I voted for the guy and I desperately wanted him to succeed. But my job is to cover politics and when you cover Obama all you see is him running for cover.

In Chris Cillizza’s smug dismissal of liberal frustration, with the curt statement “liberals and progressives have nowhere else to go,” he overlooks the fact that liberals have plenty of places to go. More than ever, in fact. From a movement-building perspective, there are more opportunities than normal in an off year to really make a difference on progressive policy.

Over several nights, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell (Last Word) has argued that Mr. Obama has pursued a brilliant strategy that has not only split the Republicans over their unwillingness to accept any tax increases but also put him in an advantageous position for getting a “clean” debt limit bill without egregious cuts, as well as gaining political traction as the only responsible adult in the room.

I remember receiving a phone call from a prominent newspaper reporter in Fall 2009 about the emergence of the Tea Party, largely in opposition to President Barack Obama’s health care legislation. “Is the Tea Party going to become a major force in American politics,” the reporter asked. “No,” I responded confidently. “Like other fringe protest parties in the past, it will fizzle quickly. Their message is too negative.”

I have never been so wrong in my life!

It’s practically a rite of passage for a labor leader to stress their independence from the Democratic Party. In the end, the alarm bells almost always go off, and labor runs back into the waiting arms of the Democrats. Not to mention that labor is intimately intertwined with the Democratic Party. They have seats on the DNC, fercryinoutloud. So will this time be any different?

A higher inflation target would, according to the experts, mean more jobs and a stronger recovery. I think people would live with higher oil prices if it meant they had a job. But Bernanke won’t do that.

At any other time, this might have seemed like a pretty good couple of days for progressives.  The Democrats in the House of Representatives showed unusual unanimity today in opposing the social-Darwinist GOP budget devised by Paul Ryan. And after an abortive attempt earlier this month to throw a wrench into the Republican majority’s legislative [...]

Looking at the current political environment and gaming out the possible actions that could be taken it seems abundantly clear that progressives best course of action on Social Security is to simply refuse to even think about allowing any changes in the program. Progressives should also follow Harry Reid’s advice by sticking to this “just say no” position for decades to come.

After the health care law passed, we were promised a massive, $125 million PR campaign staffed with top quality talent that would really sell the new law to the American people. In a fascinating article, Politico found that this promised campaign essentially crashed and burned.

Instead, the American Left’s strategy must be to re-create itself wholesale – a project likely to take at least two decades. It will have to eschew the Democratic party in the same way that, back at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, European labor had to eschew the various liberal/whig parties which shared only a part of the Left’s agenda and had no intention of ever delivering on anything else no matter how often Lefties voted Whig. It will have to begin to see the neoliberal pundits of today as political rivals, rather than as outright allies. It will have to mobilize, turn into voters, the 30% or more who are currently able to vote but do not do so. They come overwhelmingly from the poorest segment of society and do not vote purely because they see neither mainstream party as having anything for them. The Left must build its own electorate and its own party, and leave the Democrats to sink or swim as they are able.