Health & Fitness
Patch Blog: Are Our Political Expectations Too High?
Liberals are dissatisfied with President Obama, Angelenos are dissatisfied with their mayor. Are our expectations too high or do we have any expectations in the first place?
Do the voters of Los Angeles suffer an inability to compare our elected officials—particularly our Mayor—with any plausible baseline?
For that matter, what is a plausible baseline?
These two questions have tickled me since I read Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine piece “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable.” Chait methodically discusses the historic tightrope walked by Democratic presidents and the current backlash President Obama is getting from a liberal base that will still vote for him in November 2012.
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The article is a truly masterful analysis of revisionist presidential history, congenitally disappointed liberals, and conservatives’ inane and maddening ability to circle the wagons around any candidate, no matter how distasteful. Consider this paragraph:
Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead, they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.
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Seriously, have we—the voters of L.A.—ever established a clear set of expectations for our elected officials? Identity and value politics leave us all over the place, but there has to be some baseline of what we must have and against which we will all balk. Somewhere in L.A. there has to be someone like Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker. Perhaps he’s not the baseline but he sure is fun to watch from 2,800 miles away.
Booker doesn’t get it right all of the time—but damn it if he isn’t trying—conducting “open office hours” to hear out his constituents, using a much followed Twitter account that is as amusing as it is helpful (see the 2010 Snowpocalypse Tweets), and just seeming to “get it” a little bit more than most, as shown in the 2005 documentary “Street Fight.”
I’m just wondering if it is possible for an eye-level, virtual street-pounding candidate to capture and keep L.A.’s interest the way Booker has in Newark. The polls open in 14 months and I hope Angelenos get a mayor who more closely resembles what we expect.
