If it's true that nature abhors a vacuum, then that rather unnatural state of man known as cable television is positively repulsed by one. And so, during this lugubrious interregnum in which millions of us are still coming down from the months-long high of checking Nate Silver and Real Clear Politics nine times a day and dying inside because the polls out of Ohio contradict one another, the political class needs something to chatter about.

It has chosen, for more days running than I'd imagined necessary, the story of the liberal activists who already feel betrayed by Barack Obama. The Politico weighed in Monday with a piece noting that some liberals (actually, it didn't even qualify it with "some"; it just said "liberals") "are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices."

Well, they didn't call me, and you can place me well outside the magic circle. I'm not nervous or flat-out angry or even concerned. I'm excited. And by the way, the vast majority of the people I know are excited, too.

Obama is still seven weeks away from taking office but has already signaled that he's going to do grand things, huge things – dare I say heretofore unimaginable things. A half-trillion dollar (at least; some suspect it may end up being more like a trillion) jobs-and-infrastructure program, which he wants to enact as soon as possible after he takes office? Liberals have complained for decades – yes, decades, since the 1970s – about the creaky state of America's bridges and roads and the need for more spending on transit. Ditto the schools. We live in a country of which it's still probably true that most schools were built in the 1920s (New York City, for example, opened a new school building once every three weeks for that entire decade). Again, we have complained and complained and complained about their condition, and quite rightly so, for decades.

And here comes a president who is about to do something about all this, and do it more grandly than most liberals would have dared to imagine just a few months ago. And do it immediately. And he's not liberal enough? Please. If President Obama were to pass a trillion dollar jobs-and-infrastructure bill and, Heaven forbid, drop dead on his elliptical machine in March, that single act alone would be enough to make him one of the most progressive presidents in the history of the country.

You read that right. The history of the country. Remember, Bill Clinton was the master of small-bore progressivism. Lyndon Johnson had staggering domestic accomplishments, but always there is Vietnam. Franklin Roosevelt is the ne plus ultra of progressivism in the White House, and for many good reasons, but remember that he interned Japanese-Americans (and, it is largely forgotten, a smaller number of Italo-Americans) and made his deal with the racist south.

And while we're doing FDR comparisons, note Obama's rhetorical support (he has no authority to offer any other kind) of the workers at the Chicago door and window plant staging a sit-in, demanding their severance pay. Obama said emphatically: they are right. In 1936 and 1937, after his re-election, Roosevelt – as the incumbent president who'd just won 46 states (out of our then 48) and 63% of the vote and was thus in a far more powerful position than Obama is today – could not bring himself to utter a word in support of the sit-down strikers in Flint, Michigan trying to join the auto workers' union.

It was an improvement on previous practice, to be sure, that Roosevelt said nothing. His predecessors would have ordered in the troops. But he couldn't offer even a rhetorical pat on the back. Obama has brought these people national attention and sent the signal that, with respect to treatment of workers and related issues like grotesque executive compensation, on which he has also spoken out forcefully, we are going to be entering a different era. I'll send you a gold-embossed copy of Mark Penn's latest book if you can realistically persuade me that a president-elect Clinton would have said anything like what Obama said.

It's the nature of politics that activists who represent constituencies should complain – the squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. It's further in the nature of progressives that people are more likely to complain publicly than privately, which is how the right often issued its gentle remonstrances against George Bush.

And people should keep up pressure. I'm all for that. Lord knows, Obama will be getting pressure from the larger creatures of the sea, the oil companies and the insurance lobby and the centrist and conservative deficit hawks. So the smaller fish should make noise too. Politicians, even good and decent ones, don't usually do things because they're nice guys. They do things because they're getting pressure.

But there is a vast difference between applying pressure and taking bits of evidence and extrapolating to wild conclusions and crazy rhetoric from them. And people who can't see that Obama needs to reassure the political establishment by doing things like re-appointing Robert Gates at the Pentagon precisely so he can have the establishment's good will, which in turn grants him the room to operate and to isolate the political opposition, understand so little about politics that it's not even worth the time it would take to spell out the argument to them.

He will disappoint. I've said it here before, and I've said it to every audience I've spoken to in recent weeks. That is inevitable. Once in office, he will need to prove that he is the boss, and not this or that Cabinet officer, and if there's any leading around by the nose to be done, he'll be doing it.

But he's still weeks away from office and he's already backing up powerless working people, talking about hundreds of billions in government dollars being committed to building up the country, tackling health care and climate change, reiterating that deficit reduction is a low priority right now, standing by his pledge to draw down in Iraq and apparently planning to go to Cairo (probably) to give a speech on America's new relationship to the world – a move, again, that I can't conceive of any president of my lifetime having the guts to consider making in his first hundred days.

The cable shows have hours to fill, and bloggers know that if they complain they might well be asked to help fill them. But disappointment…anger? If what we've seen so far be compromise, I say serve me seconds.