The White House says Obama has worked hard to achieve the goals of his progressive agenda, especially health reform. Left to Obama: We're not happy

The left has a message for Barack Obama: Shape up, or we’re shipping out.

A high-profile conclave of progressives, which served as a platform for supporting Obama in years past, opened in Washington on Monday amid growing disenchantment with the president over the Gulf oil spill, health care, jobs, immigration and political deal cutting.


Liberal activists warned that Obama can no longer count on a progressive base that was supposed to protect Democrats from a mass wipeout in the midterms in 2010 and propel him to reelection in 2012.

“We are not apathetic, we are not depressed — we are willing to get out and fight for the people who fight for us,” said Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn.org’s campaign director, at the Campaign for America’s Future annual meeting. “But no longer can they count on us for a solid Democratic vote. We are getting more sophisticated to understand that not all Democrats are created equal.”

The criticism of Obama during the lightly attended opening day was more visceral than issue specific and more in the vein of familial disapproval than open revolt. It’s also not clear where liberals, who helped fueled Obama’s ascent to the presidency, might turn in 2012 if Obama is on the ballot.

But the left's lack of enthusiasm for its representation in Washington — the "enthusiasm gap" between dispirited liberals and hyperenergized conservatives — is palpable and poses a real danger to Obama and his congressional allies, said veteran progressive Robert Borosage, who organized the conference.

“We have the energy and the willingness to mobilize; we can be a huge ally or a huge obstruction,” he warned. “No president wants trouble in the base, and Obama doesn’t want trouble in his base.”

Sterling Newberry, an economist and consultant who has attended the event for years, said the mood of the left could be read by the several dozen empty chairs in the ballroom during the opening session of the conference.

“It wasn’t always like this,” he said of the turnout. “The Republicans out of power are fired up to vote, and the Democrats who are in power are de-motivated.”

The White House said Obama has worked hard to achieve the goals of his progressive agenda, especially health reform.

“During his first 500 days in office, President Obama has fulfilled his commitment to bring the change we need to Washington by signing historic health care reform legislation that will reduce costs for millions of families and small businesses, implementing education reforms that will lay the foundation for our nation’s long-term economic strength and reducing the influence of special interests that has changed business as usual in Washington,” said White House spokesman Joshua Earnest.

Obama took a bit of beating at the conference last year – after it was renamed “America's Future Now” from the catchier, pre-Obama “Take Back America” – for his early compromises on health care. His aides have always viewed the conference with some ambivalence, considering its leadership as more aligned with red-meat populists like Howard Dean and John Edwards. But Obama got the hero’s welcome during appearances in 2006 and 2007, when he bashed Bush, reveled in a long standing ovations and delivered a speeches not too dissimilar from the red-meat addresses delivered on Monday.

“These are Americans who still believe in an America where anything's possible - they just don't think their leaders do,” Obama said in 2006. “These are Americans who still dream big dreams -they just sense their leaders have forgotten how.”

Answers for solving the problem were in shorter supply: Those in attendance said there wasn't a magic solution but demanded progress on ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and proof that Obama was willing to expend political capital to pass immigration reform despite dim hopes of passage on the Hill.

And like Obama’s critics on the right, many progressives seized on the administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill to vent their larger frustrations.

“We thought that an election was victory. We forgot that candidates don’t deliver change, that they become part of the system,” said Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins of Green for All, a progressive environmental group that opposes Obama’s loosening of offshore oil exploration restrictions.

“While I voted for Barack Obama and I would again, he is not enough and we [need to] push him and say that his handling of BP is atrocious at best,” she said to applause at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. “I believe in the president, but I believe in the needs of the people of the Gulf more. ... I believe in holding people accountable, even people we love.”

Despite the subcapacity attendance on the first day, the event, sponsored by unions and progressive groups, is still a big draw to liberals, with planned Tuesday appearances by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.

Former SEIU President Andy Stern, a major Obama supporter who serves on his deficit reduction commission, cast the conflict in slightly different terms, saying the left needed to provide “the wind” in Obama’s sails — to propel his agenda leftward.

Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, said most of Obama’s problems stem from Obama’s quest for bipartisanship with Republicans on almost every issue, including offshore oil drilling.

“Bipartisanship is not the way to find American change. So far bipartisanship has brought us a no-strings-attached bailout. It has brought us the freedom from the burden of an affordable public option [in health care reform]. It has also brought us an ongoing war in Afghanistan, … and every day we see more penguins and dolphins covered in bipartisanship,” she said.

Huffington said she still backs Obama but called for “Change 2.0.”

All presidents grapple with satisfying their base: George W. Bush’s political team, led by Karl Rove, spent much of its time quelling potential revolts from the religious right, whose leaders accused the White House of slow-walking its anti-abortion and pro-school-prayer agenda.

With white independents deserting in droves, Obama and Democrats desperately need the party’s fractious core of liberal supporters. Recent polls show that progressives are far less willing to turn out to back Democrats this year — and far less energized than the GOP base and conservative tea party activists.

Obama’s relationship with the left took a big hit on health care reform when the administration agreed to major deals with drug companies and signed off on a deal to strip the public option from the Senate bill.

And the left also was rankled by administration efforts to stop progressive Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) from challenging Obama’s hand-picked candidate, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.). Obama’s decision to back Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), however anemically, against Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in the Democratic primary has pitted him against Big Labor.

Halter supporter Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos blog, never called out Obama by name but said that a Lincoln loss would send a message to the D.C. establishment.

“We’re going to take out Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas,” said Moulitsas. “It’s an unprecedented alliance between netroots labor and the environmental movement … to realize that we have to hold people in D.C. accountable. ... They are immune to reason, they are immune to public opinion. ... They are not immune to losing elections, and that’s where it hurts.”

But even Moulitsas acknowledged the difficulty in getting progressives to speak with one voice on the issues.

He suggested that Democrats, like Republicans -- and Obama circa '08 -- stress broader principles and eschew specific policy platforms: “What you get is irrelevant and scary to the American people. ... If we’re talking to people, the less details the better.”