Support Obama? Then oppose him

What the the healthcare debacle has shown very clearly is how Obama's supporters undermine him at every turn. No, not by abandoning ship, but by standing by him no matter what. As a result, Obama has gotten far less on healthcare than he could have. Jane Hamsher sates Rahm Emanuel’s strategy thusly:

“The trick is to put a package together that some visible element of ‘the left’ is out there opposing..."

You see, Obama’s strategy has always been to keep some core group of his supporters spitting hellfire over his compromising ways which he can then sell to the middle as a reasonable, centrist position. The reasoning behind this strategy is sound: If you’re a liberal, DC hates you, the punditry hates you, and therefore Rahm Emanuel hates you in the hopes you will hate Obama enough to make him part of the DC country club. Otherwise, he's got to be the guy who goes in and breaks some china.

But liberals refused to play along. Obama’s strongest defenders could not be swayed in their belief Obama would never sell them down the river. There was no convincing them he could do any wrong, and so they would not push him to do right – if Obama did it, it was right. And so, came the inevitable compromise after compromise. The Democratic leadership even went so far as to give away the store to the liberal bogey man Joe Lieberman, and still, that visible element of the left failed to materialize as needed to motivate DC to rally around the bill.

This support then gave Lieberman pause: “[Lieberman] said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals," and so, assuming the lack of hysteria meant he asked for too little, he moved the goalposts to ask for more.

Finally, the Democrats took it a step too far, and the left finally rebelled and abandoned ship. The centrists, finally convinced there was no more blood left in this turnip, signed on and Reid got his 60 for cloture.

So, if progressives don't want the same thing to happen with the jobs bills and other measures, they need to start making the President in effigy and break out the matches much sooner. They need to stop playing nice and start acting like the foul-mouthed, unreasonable ideologues the center expects, because until they are dissatisfied, the Broders will continue to find the bill too extreme.

Support will only make Obama's opinion appear extremist, and you’re going to see a lot more of his efforts get flittered away as he shifts ever rightward, hoping to disillusion someone enough to stop following him and leave him someone to triangulate. Blind support only serves to deny him the desired position at the top of the pyramid, and has left him, instead, at the top of a vertical line.

Clearly, in the face of so much good will and support among his supporters, if Obama wants to accomplish healthcare and anything else in the future, he either needs to a) pursue a strategy that relies on the faith of his supporters as opposed to their cynicism, or b) appeal to his supporters to get off-board and stymie him at every turn.

Until then, if you support Obama - if you really support Obama -- you'd oppose him.