Now that Peter Daou and Politico have thoughfully provided us with an Obama Administration ‘Enemies List’ and I have gotten over my embarrassment at not being famous and influential enough to be on it (yet), I thought I’d share one of its prominent members, John Aravosis’, reaction-
(E)ven when you say “the blogs helped cause the President’s problems” what does that mean? The Obama administration and its apologists would have you believe that the liberal blogs have an almost svengali-like power to trick our readers, and Democratic voters generally, into being disappointed with the President and Congress. I’m not convinced that our readers are so stupid that they’d believe “lies.” We could only get away with lying once or twice before our stories simply wouldn’t pan out, our predictions wouldn’t end up happening, and our readers would realize that we had no clue what was really going on in Washington politics. Except we ended up being right.
On gay rights, Joe and I have an almost perfect track record of predicting everything the Obama administration and Democratic Congress were going to do on DADT, DOMA and ENDA, and ultimately, in predicting just how much trouble our community would be in as a result of the Democrats’ disinterest in our issues.
But the gay community isn’t alone. Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU surely haven’t been wrong about their early warnings regarding Obama’s civil liberties policies. And were environmentalists wrong to question whether Team Obama would act forcefully and quickly on global warming? Have Latinos been wrong to worry that Obama wouldn’t keep his promise to pass immigration reform last year, and now this year? Then there’s health care reform – yes, the President and the Congress did something, but not nearly what they were capable of doing with the majorities and the public support we gave them.
Perhaps the reason the President’s voters-turned-critics have influence, and perhaps the reason the President and the party are increasingly less popular, isn’t because we’re consistently wrong – but rather because we’re right.
And nothing makes you more hated by fools and liars than being right.
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