You begin reform with the Congress you have, not the Congress you might like to have or might have at a later time. Over at MoJo, Kevin Drum writes:

Obama is a president, not a king. On taxes, for example, his position has been steady and clear all along: extend the broad tax cuts but kill the cuts aimed solely at the rich. So why hasn’t it happened? Because of opposition from within his own party. A tax bill could have been passed by reconciliation in the Senate, but for some reason it wasn’t. It could have been passed in the House, but a combination of Blue Dogs and fainthearted centrists afraid of attack ads blocked it. And as much as we all like to pine for the days of LBJ and the “treatment,” those days are long gone. It’s genuinely not clear what kind of leverage Obama has over recalcitrant members of Congress. Not a lot, in any case. (Boldface mine)

As I’ve reported here recently, the Alabama Democratic Party has just lost Goat Hill for the first time in 136 years — and seems determined to repeat their behavior of 2010. The most effective leader in Congress was Nancy Pelosi, but she no longer leads the House while the most spineless Democratic leader, Harry Reid, remains in place. What kind of message do you think that sends to Democrats in Washington?

Obama’s presidency is an opportunity for progressives, nothing more. He isn’t magic, and does not get to write legislation with a veto pen. I’d go further than Drum and say the 2010 midterm was a failure of movement. Obama credits the antiwar protests of the last decade for his decision to run for office, but having elected him, there seems to have been a long lunch break from activism.

Worse, the “online left” has paid hyper-attention to every perceived or imagined failing during the last two years, enabling the Republican strategy to make the midterm elections all about someone who wasn’t even on the ballot.

Remember how firebaggers exploded over the offshore drilling announcement? Remember how they burned so fiercely while the oil spilled freely? Remember the online revulsion as it seemed the president would let drilling recommence? The administration has finally decided against the entire idea of expanding offshore drilling. Obama is quite amenable to empiricism; the problem, again, is that a consensus inside the Beltway is not. Dan Froomkin wrote an epic post on this yesterday:

The conventional wisdom among this city’s elite is that if liberals and conservatives would only sit down and actually listen to each other, they would find common ground somewhere in the middle. Actually, it’s a belief that goes beyond conventional wisdom — it is an object of faith, the central tenet of the inside-the-Beltway religion known as High Broderism. And it is most devoutly held when it comes to the subject of the national deficit — as demonstrated by the recent orgiastic coverage of President Obama’s deficit-hawk-heavy fiscal commission.

Froomkin relates the recent attempt by Pete Peterson, a billionaire with a self-titled foundation, to manufacture support for the mythical deficit consensus by bringing 3,500 Americans together at 57 sites around the country in a kind of crowdsourced focus group. Unfortunately for Peterson these “average Americans” actually formed an enthusiastic consensus for a more progressive taxation system, with cuts to defense spending instead of social entitlement programs.That consensus even included majorities of the self-described conservatives who were involved.

But that has not happened in Congress, even with a Democratic majority. At the Washington Post, Ezra Klein laments that Obama has not issued a veto threat over billionaire tax cuts as if such a threat would actually be welcome inside the Beltway; when Democrats are already having trouble continuing the unemployment program (to say nothing of extending benefits past 99 weeks), a veto threat is not constructive.

Nor is all the bellyaching about tax cuts constructive. If every blog currently moaning about Obama and tax cuts would instead press readers to make phone calls, we might have something. Congress, not the president, is the branch Constitutionally appointed to decide which tax cuts pass and which don’t.

The netroots had better learn this lesson. All 95 Democrats pledged to support net neutrality lost their races in November. The price of magical thinking — that one man, however gifted, could ever overcome the culture of Washington on his own — is the utter destruction of the netroots’ own signature cause. Whatever influence we might have owned on November 1st has been erased. If both president and Congress join the Beltway’s false consensus, it is because we have failed to create any alternative.

H/t to Socratic for the title.