Voices on the left say they plan to be more critical of Obama’s performance. Left media has 'issues' with Obama

For the better part of four years, progressive media has had President Barack Obama’s back.

Now that he’s won re-election, it is faced with a choice: Should the left continue always to play the loyal attack dog against the GOP, blaming the opposition at all hours of the news cycle for intransigence? Or, should it redirect some of that energy on the president, holding him to his promises and encouraging him to be a more outspoken champion of liberal causes?


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Already, there are rumblings of change.

In the days and weeks following Obama’s victory, progressive voices, primarily in print media, have made efforts to push the president on key parts of the unfinished liberal agenda - including climate change, drone strikes, troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the closing of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, civil liberties and gun control.

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The New York Times editorial page launched a series titled “ Goals for a New Term,” calling on the president to implement stronger gun control laws and shutter Gitmo, which he had pledged to do during his first year in office. The tone of the editorials has been sharply critical: On guns, the editors suggested Obama lacked courage. On Guantanamo, they slammed his administration for deciding “to adopt the Bush team’s extravagant claims of state secrets and executive power, blocking any accountability for the detention and brutalization of hundreds of men at Guantánamo and secret prisons, and denying torture victims their day in court.”

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, sought to put similar pressure on Obama on the issue of climate change. “For the most part… the accumulating crisis of climate change has been treated as a third-tier issue,” Remnick wrote. “[I]n his acceptance speech, Obama mentioned climate change once again. Which is good, but, at this late date, he gets no points for mentioning. The real test of his determination will be a willingness to step outside the day-to-day tumult of Washington politics and establish a sustained sense of urgency.”

Guest-hosting on MSNBC’s noon program, “Now With Alex Wagner,” The Nation’s Ari Melber criticized Obama’s lack of transparency in the use of drone strikes to target terrorists, including some American citizens. “That secretive approach is at odds with the commitment that Obama made during his first campaign for the presidency when he advocated the rights of due process for all, even accused terrorists,” Melber said. “Today, there’s no public process to determine whether the right people are targeted under the drone program, and drone attacks have increased substantially during Obama’s first term.”

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In conversations with POLITICO, some of the left’s most influential voices in media said that, with the concerns of re-election over, they intend to be more critical of the president’s performance and more aggressive in urging him to pursue a progressive agenda as the clock ticks on his last four years in office.

“Liberals in the media are going to be tougher on Obama and more respectful at the same time,” Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker’s chief political commentator and a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, told POLITICO. “He was the champion of our side, he vanquished the foe….. [but] now liberals don’t have to worry about hurting his chances for re-election, so they can be tougher in urging him to do what he should be doing.”

“In a tight election, people were sensitive to anything that would jeopardize the president’s re-election,” said Melber. “There’s no question that a second term changes the center of gravity for any administration: There is no reasonable argument that criticism will result in the defeat of Barack Obama.”

But many liberal columnists and media pundits also agreed that efforts to focus on the president will likely be overshadowed to some degree by the the familiar attacks on Republicans that fire up the liberal base and draw ratings on MSNBC, the left’s largest megaphone.

“There is a level at which coverage of Republican intransigence produces a visceral effect in the audience that is in some ways less conflicted and more pleasurable than critical coverage of President Obama,” said Chris Hayes, the host of MSNBC’s more substantive weekend program, “Up.” “It just produces a different effect in the viewer.”

“MSNBC, with all due respect, has not been that strong in terms of talking about closing Guantanamo, about militarization, about this administration’s civil liberties record,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, told POLITICO. “We may address alternative approaches to those issues, but they won’t be the talking points on MSNBC that night.”

(MSNBC declined POLITICO’s requests for interviews with MSNBC president Phil Griffin or anyone who could speak on behalf of the network’s editorial content.)

By the time liberal opinion leaders who fell in love with Obama in 2008 started to face some disappointments with the president in 2010, a new GOP opposition in the House was drawing the brunt of the left’s criticism. Over the last 18 months, a theatrical Republican primary and an all-consuming general election season turned liberal firepower squarely on those that would threaten Obama’s second term. Faced with that challenge, progressives have rallied behind the Democratic president, largely tabling their own concerns with the occupant of the Oval Office.

A second term offers a chance for renewed efforts, but despite the tone of urgency from progressive editors and columnists, these calls to action have failed to become rallying cries for the party at large. Far from gaining a foothold in the national news cycle, Guantanamo, gun control, and global warming languish as “third-tier” issues — in Remnick’s words — while partisan standoffs over the “fiscal cliff” and Obama’s next Secretary of State drive the news cycle.

All this is notably different from right-wing media, which for all its internal bickering over the future of the Republican party can seem much more organized in rallying around a cause. What germinates in the conservative blogosphere or on the Wall Street Journal’s op/ed page can rocket to the top of the hour on Fox News and permeate the widely influential conservative talk-radio circuit with a velocity that some liberals find enviable.

“The amazing way that the right can move something from the fringes to the mainstream is sort of remarkable,” Hayes said. “I don’t think there’s any corollary on the left.”

But vanden Heuvel says The Nation is fighting for progressivism in the long-term.

“If 2008 was a time for the audicity of hope, the years ahead are a time for sobriety, determination, resilience,” she said. “The problems we face, there’s no quick fix. There is a growing awarness coming out of Obama’s first administration that progressivism is in it for the long-haul: it requires institutions, a powerful, idea-driven politics — as opposed to the war-room mentality.”

Vanden Heuvel and others suggested progressives should act as counterweights to — rather than critics of — conservative pressures.

“I think ‘The Nation’ is about spining up Democrats,” she said. “There are not a lot of new ideas in D.C. Progressives need to drive those ideas from the outside — from the states, the cities — and expand the parameters beyond the establishment, Beltway-insider narrative.”

“Washington is the only place in America where deficit-cutting and chinos are still in style,” Melber said. “Today’s debates keep bumping up against old conservative barriers. The president needs people to the left who have his back and can push him past old, discredited ideas.”

Hertzberg cited President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the criticism he received from his own party: “When he would get criticized from the left, FDR would say ‘Make me. Generate some public support’,” Hertzberg explained. “Instead of beating [Obama] up for the parts that liberals don’t like, they need to make it clear there’s public support for these issues.”

Hayes describes his role not “as being adversarial or on anyone’s side,” but simply to inform viewers, though he says that critiquing the president is often a more complicated undertaking for progressives.

“I think among progressives, speaking broadly, at one level people think of Barack Obama as one of them, as being an ally. At another level he is the president of the United States, one of the most powerful people on earth,” Hayes said. “There are a certain set of commitments, from the left’s perspective, that he’s accountable to, [but] it’s just a more conflicted undertaking — though we don’t feel that means we shouldn’t do it.”

In Remnick’s column about global warming, he cited writer and activist Bill McKibben, who wrote in The New York Review of Books, “Global warming happens just slowly enough that political systems have been able to ignore it.”

For the moment, that seems to be the fate of Guantanamo, gun control, drone strikes, and a host of other progressive causes as well. Republican intransigence seems more pressing, and certainly sells better. That, Hayes says, is “as much as about the news cycle as it is about the left media.”

Even when progressives do focus on their own party, there are times one gets the sense they’d rather talk about their possible next president than their current one.

Asked how he thought liberal media would cover Obama’s second term, Frank Rich, the progressive New York Magazine columnist, told POLITICO: “I thought everyone had already moved on to Hillary.”