1. We would not be in Iraq or Afghanistan today. 2. We would have government mandates for green energy. 3. We would have a government single payer health care plan, not Obamacare. 4. We would already increased taxes on the top 2%. 5. We would have investigations and arrests and convictions of the real cause of the financial crisis. 6. We would not care about Israel all that much. 7. We would not have corporate welfare. 8. We would have normalized relationships with Cuba, and even gone so far as to make them the 58th state (ooooops). Please feel free to add to the list of things Obama would have done if he actually had been a leftist.
Which begs the question, why do the vast majority of liberals and the media still so fervently support him?
The extremist right wingers don't understand that the real leftists are unhappy with Obama because he is not left enough, and to willing to compromise with the right wing. You can always tell if someone is a moderate...they are disliked by the extremes on both sides. Of course, the right wingers never think they are extremists, nor do the left wing extremists, and the concept to them of moderate is anyone who is not as extreme as they are in their positions.
And yet they still fervently support him. Which brings us back to my question, why still support him if they're so unhappy with him?
False. They don't fervently support him, the fervently attack the right wing extremism. Yours is a fallacy of a false dillema...geez, what a shock. Were you to actually pay attention to something like the talking heads on MSNBC, you would know that they take Obama to task on lots of issues. The guests they have on, noteably liberal also don't agree with Obama on all issues, but they nearly all agree that the right wing extremism is out of control. When Bush was in power, Fox News rarely, rarely, if ever, except the token liberals like Alan Colmes...said anything contrary to Bush.
Well you see that would be potentially effective left policy. some of that list was what I was hoping he would accomplish after all that is what he was selling. Instead we got porkulous, obama care and world wide instability and bank bailouts. that is the new left and that is why he is too left.
The reason Obama got none of that list of horribles passed is that he wasted all his first two years on socialized medicine, plus there were enough barely rational democrats not to support him on those items. It wasn't because he didn't want them, that's for sure, so once again Optional's entire thesis is shown to be bogus.
To an extremist like you, of course anything left of Ann counter is left wing. To moderates, Obama's actions are mostly moderate, leaning left. However, the extreme left is not happy with Obama. Will the extreme left abandon Obama in 2012? They might, if and only if the republican choice appeals to them, or if there is a strong true left wing candidate they would vote for...like the 3% who voted for Nader and influenced the Bush/Gore election. However, if you take a detached view, it is easy to see that Obama is more of a centrist than anything else. He is not a leftist by any reasonable measure, your measure is that of an extremist right winger. I know that a reasonable point of view won't work for extremists like you, especially when your head is fill with the daily Rush, Fox News type of information. But in reality, there is a far right, a moderate right, a pure moderate, a moderate left, and a leftist. Obama is not a leftist...for if he were he would have: See list above.
A true leftist would have gone straight for a public option, effectively crippling the insurance industry. Obama and congress sold out to the corporate insurance lobby...which is something a true leftist would not do. So you response is refuted, as usual.