Obama Loses the Left

It's not just gun-toting rightwingers who distrust Obama. US progressives have lost faith in his commitment to change

By Dan Kennedy, guardian.co.uk, September 1, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/01/barack-obama-healthcare-left-trust

Excerpt: ... Last Tuesday the liberal host of MSNBC's Countdown, perhaps the loudest Barack Obama cheerleader on cable news, singled out the Obama White House in his sarcastic Best Persons in the World segment for the "best impression of the Bush administration".

Obama's sin: hiring the Rendon Group, the beneficiary of Bush-administration largesse, to screen journalists seeking to be embedded with US military forces by picking over their past coverage.

"It gets worse," Olbermann continued, complaining that the Rendon Group had worked with Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader whose propaganda had helped pave the way for the American invasion. (The story was first reported by the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. The contract was terminated earlier this week.)

In this, the summer of Barack Obama's discontent, the president is generally portrayed as a victim of gun-toting rightwingers who bellow about death panels at healthcare forums, rascally members of Congress more interested in political gamesmanship than in the public good and his own inexperience and overreaching.

What's generally left out of the equation is growing discontent on among the leftwing netroots. ...