Obama Loses the Left

Events have forced the president into embarrassing reversals that have alienated much of his base.

Iraq, immigration, inversion. On all three of the issues referred to, President Obama finds himself forced by events to do something he dislikes — and he’s in trouble with much of his Democratic-party base for doing so.

Obama seemed ill at ease before the camera and teleprompter on the evening of September 10th. Sending troops into Iraq and Syria is probably the last thing he expected to do when he set out running for president in 2007.

He still insists that he will send in “no ground troops,” though it appears that hundreds of U.S. military personnel are literally on the ground in Iraq. He seems still not to understand that publicly ruling out an alternative means that your enemies know your plans — and can take advantage of them.

But that’s not enough to propitiate at least some Democrats who supported Obama fervently because they believed he would remove U.S. troops from the Middle East and never send them back there.

One of his chief advantages over Hillary Clinton in 2008 was her vote for the Iraq War resolution in 2002 and Obama’s opposition to it, albeit as a state senator from an overwhelmingly Democratic district.

More