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FoxNews.com…
Obama
Faces Backlash From Left Amid
Economic Uncertainty
Published August 09, 2011
President
Obama is facing a storm of
criticism from his usual supporters as his administration tries to
navigate the
debt debate in Washington and the economic tumult on Wall Street.
The
bipartisan deal to raise the debt
ceiling, while loathed by the Tea Party, was likewise panned by the
left. That
discontent grew after Obama emerged in the middle of a raucous
afternoon on
Wall Street Monday to offer some vague words of encouragement to a
skittish
economy.
“Anyone
hungering for a robust vision
to invigorate the economy and increase employment is still hungry,” The
New
York Times declared in its editorial Tuesday, asking the president for
a
“broader vision” beyond his proposed extensions of prior proposals. The
Times
said the payroll tax cut extension and unemployment aid he touts are
“useful
but only as a start.”
Progressives
who make up the
president’s base have long harbored doubts about his commitment to some
of
their causes, pointing to his hesitant positions on gun control and gay
marriage, his lack of progress on immigration reform and his
willingness to
negotiate away Republican demands like last year’s short-term extension
of the
Bush-era tax cuts.
Obama
also has made the left jittery
by talking about entitlement reform. He said Monday that a new
bipartisan
committee tasked with finding deficit savings should take on the tax
code as
well as programs like Medicare.
MoveOn.org
Director Justin Ruben
warned that if Obama accepts a form of tax reform that asks “relatively
little”
of the wealthy, “it will be clear that the White House learned nothing
from the
recent debt fight.” Ruben urged Obama to put forward a “bold,
progressive plan”
for the economy.
Don’t
look to Obama for that, said
Cenk Uygur, host of liberal Internet talk show The Young Turks.
“After
yet another unconditional
surrender in the debt ceiling talks, he’s hit his tipping point,” he
wrote on
The Huffington Post.
Uygur
claimed a profound discontent on
the left with the direction of Obama’s administration and his handling
of negotiations
with Republicans. That feeling could explain why Sen. Bernie Sanders,
I-Vt.,
arguably the most liberal senator in Congress, suggested last month
that Obama
face a primary challenger next year.
A
broader criticism has been that the
president has had trouble articulating his vision.
Washington
Post columnist Dana
Milbank, after observing Obama’s brief remarks in the middle of a
600-plus-point dive for the Dow Jones Industrial Average Monday, wrote
that
“the most powerful man in the world seems strangely powerless, and
irresolute,
as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency.”
But
the Obama administration is trying
to stay above the chaos on Wall Street and the credit rating downgrade
by
Standard & Poor’s that preceded Monday’s selloff.
“Markets
will rise and fall, but this
is the United States of America. No matter what some agency may say,
we’ve
always been and always will be a triple-A country,” Obama said Monday,
pointing
to “economic factors that we can’t control” like earthquakes and oil
prices and
economic sputtering in other parts of the world.
As
the left grumbles, conservatives
continue to try luring him to their way of thinking on deficit
reduction.
Senate
Republican Leader Mitch
McConnell said Monday that he agrees with Obama that the newly formed
joint
committee should “focus on entitlement reform.”
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