Ted Strickland (left) and Bernie Sanders say the debate has shifted to the right. | AP Photos The summer of liberal discontent

If there’s anything Democrats are enjoying about the excruciatingly prolonged impasse over raising the debt ceiling, it’s the raw ugliness of the divisions opening up between Republican factions in Congress.

But the stalemate is also exposing long-simmering strains between President Barack Obama and his own liberal supporters angry with what they believe to be the compromises he seems willing to make in the name of getting a deal and winning over independent voters.


Above all, they question his sudden embrace of the GOP’s budget-slashing over his party’s time-honored priorities of job creation and economic equality.

“We’ve allowed the center to be shifted to the right in terms of the debate that’s taken place,” said Ted Strickland, former Democratic governor of Ohio who was swept away in the 2010 midterm tea party wave.

Even Strickland, briefly considered by Obama for the post of Democratic National Committee chairman, is annoyed by one of the president’s favorite rhetorical memes — the call for “shared sacrifice” by Republican fat cats.

“I don’t know if they failed; I think they may have miscalculated,” he said of the administration’s handling of the debt messaging. But “I’m troubled when I hear the phrase ‘shared sacrifice,’ because, quite frankly, I think the working people in this country have already sacrificed.”

For the moment, most Democrats are a lot more united than Republicans on the debt debate. But they are increasingly restive as they balance loyalty to Obama and their commitment to preserving entitlement programs and tax equity, core principles they see as being chucked overboard in the interest of appeasing tea party Republicans.

Even the least painful resolution to the crisis — a plan backed by Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that is a cocktail of deep cuts in discretionary public spending and infrastructure improvements without a whiff of the tax-the-wealthy agenda that has been a staple Democratic demand — is poison to many progressives.

“Every policy outcome for liberals is a loss at this point,” a senior party operative said, reflecting the prevailing view among progressives that the alternatives mulled by Obama in the debt talks range from the awful to the unthinkable.

“We may win on the politics,” the operative said, “but the policy battle is lost. It’s just depressing.”

Several recent polls show unmistakable signs of Obama’s slippage with this core group. A Washington Post survey released last week found that the percentage of self-described liberals who “strongly” support the president’s performance on jobs has fallen 22 points over the past year, from 53 percent to 31 percent.

The percentage of African-American Democrats, Obama’s electoral core, who think he’s doing a good job on the economy, has plummeted from 77 percent last year to a little over 50 percent.

A CNN poll released last Friday showed Obama’s overall approval rating dropped from 48 percent to 45 percent in the past month, sapped, in part, by dampened liberal enthusiasm.

“You’ll see signs of a stirring discontent on the left,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said when the survey was released.

“Thirty-eight percent say they disapprove because President Obama has been too liberal, but 13 percent say they disapprove of Obama because he has not been liberal enough — nearly double what it was in May, when the question was last asked, and the first time that number has hit double digits in Obama’s presidency.”

Disaffection with leadership is a birthright for liberals — and some prominent ones, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman are longtime critics of Obama. Not surprisingly, they have stepped up their criticism recently.

Krugman described the scrapped “grand bargain” between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) as “horrifying” and a “real betrayal of both Democratic principles and good government.”

Sanders has gone so far as to call on liberals to back a primary challenger against Obama in 2012. That’s how upset he was by the budget cuts Obama agreed to in last spring’s continuing resolution pact with Boehner — and Obama’s bargaining posture now.

“Sadly, the Democrats have yielded far, far too much,” Sanders told POLITICO. “In December, with the Democrats controlling the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, they extended Bush’s tax breaks for the rich and lowered the tax rates on estates for the very rich. In April, they allowed tens of billions of dollars in cuts to vitally important programs for low- and moderate-income Americans.”

Most liberals have nonetheless always closed ranks around Obama, and he remains the most popular leader of their party in a generation. A recent Gallup poll found him roughly on a par with popular Democrats in the past at similar points in his presidency, with about three-quarters of Democrats still behind him.

But while an immense reservoir of liberal goodwill toward Obama is still there, it drained a bit during the health care and budget battles, and by some measures, it’s at an even lower ebb now as Obama accedes to demand after demand fron congressional Republicans.

Whether this disappointment is a blip or materially dampens enthusiasm among Obama’s base in 2012 remains an open question. But Democrats are openly worrying that the terms of political debate for the next two years have been established to the GOP’s advantage, however Obama emerges from the current fight.

None of Obama’s moves during the debt debate have alienated his Democratic base as much as his eleventh-hour willingness to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and his apparent green-lighting of raising the Medicare retirement age from 65 to 67 as part of his abortive deal with Boehner. Obama withdrew that offer last Friday when Boehner stomped out of talks, but it could be revived in the unlikely event the GOP warms to the idea of a new bargain.

Liberal activist Adam Green, whose name has become synonymous with liberal disaffection with Obama, recently delivered pledges from 200,000 Obama 2008 volunteers that they will withold support if the president agrees to any entitlement cuts.

“These negotiations were an opportunity to declare loudly and clearly that the middle class has sacrificed enough — and that it’s time for the rich and big corporations to finally pay their fair share,” said Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

“Instead, this president bragged about putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the table for cuts and taking higher tax rates for the rich off the table. That’s basically a blueprint for how Democrats can lose swing votes and progressive volunteers and donors in 2012.”

Obama’s persistent references to how he was challenging his own party has further antagonized congressional Democrats, who complain that he has quietly embraced Clinton-era political triangulation, despite banning that word from the West Wing.

“Some of the cuts would target worthwhile programs that do a lot of good for our country. They’re cuts that some people in my own party aren’t too happy about, and frankly, I wouldn’t make them if we didn’t have so much debt,” Obama wrote in a USA Today column last week, a theme he has sounded repeatedly in the past few weeks.

Strickland thinks the proposed increase in the retirement age is “an example of us having the battle within their frame, on [Republican] territory” that compromises the administration’s effort to win the issue most likely to influence voters: job creation.

In the view of many liberals, said Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, “when [Obama] starts to triangulate, he tends to end up in a straight line, going right.”

Obama’s aides, in the West Wing and at his campaign headquarters in Chicago, are keenly aware of the problem.

The reelection campaign has had no problem attracting volunteers, aides say, and the president’s small donor base is alive and kicking into high gear with over a half-million under-$200 contributors donating in the past three months. But while big-money campaign donors are giving at a record pace, they haven’t been shy about delivering tongue lashings along with their checks.

Earlier this month, prominent San Francisco liberal donor Guy Saperstein told POLITICO there was “almost universal disappointment” with Obama among progressives on issues ranging from the administration’s failure to close Guantanamo, fully withdraw from Iraq and create more jobs.

As a result, campaign manager Jim Messina, along with deputies Julianna Smoot and Jen O’Malley Dillon have had to massage contributors who think the president caved too quickly on the public option, the Bush tax cuts and pulling revenue off the table in the debt talks.

The White House, led by Stephanie Cutter, top deputy to Obama senior adviser David Plouffe, keeps in regular contact with progressive leaders. Shortly before Obama’s speech to the nation Monday, Cutter checked in with the group, which pressed her politely on the Medicare proposal; Cutter reportedly assured them that the deal was off the table.

A few hours later, Obama took to the airwaves and offered a largely symbolic sop to his base and like-minded independents — declaring his support for tax hikes on corporations and the $250,000-plus earners, even though Reid had stripped any revenue hikes from the consensus Democratic plan.

The irony is that a majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum are backing the progressive position on taxes for the first time in decades: Most independents and a fair plurality of Republicans say they back Obama’s push to cut corporate loopholes and hike taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

“It’s frustrating, because we are being held up by a bunch of irresponsible radicals,” said veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who has recently picked up some anti-Obama feeling during focus groups of potential Democratic donors.

Still, he cautions not to overinterpret the signs of liberal unrest.

“Look, these people are going to be with Obama next year,” he said. “But they are a little upset, not so much about what’s going on now, but about what the administration did when they had majorities in both houses … like the public option. … But he still does very well with the base.”