Jonathan Chait makes some perfectly fine points in berating his fellow liberals for their despair over Obama. The man has actually delivered quite a few major progressive achievements (duh, health care!). But there’s a problem with the long excerpt from Michael Tomasky he cites as proof of his point. Here’s part of it:

To read through any number of thorough histories of the New Deal is to be struck not by the differences between Roosevelt (man of action) and Obama (pensive equivocator) but by the many consistencies in how politics actually unfolds in real time–the difficulties inherent in trying to effect change, the readiness to accept half a loaf, and the regular reassurances sent to the moneyed classes that the liberals hadn’t taken over the candy store. It’s worth noting, for example, that the second act to become law under the New Deal, after the Emergency Banking Act, which was a progressive piece of legislation, was a conservative bill, the Economy Act. It cut salaries of government employees and benefits to veterans, the latter by 15 percent. Arthur Schlesinger, in The Coming of the New Deal, writes that literally an hour after signing the banking act, Roosevelt outlined this bill to congressional leaders, saying the next day and sounding more than a little like some Robert Rubin progenitor had been whispering in his ear: “For three long years, the federal government has been on the road toward bankruptcy.” (And maybe one had: Schlesinger notes that Roosevelt’s budget director, Lewis Douglas, was certainly no Keynesian.) Just imagine Obama having tried something like that, alienating both veterans and AFSCME within a week of taking office. The Economy Act was opposed by many liberals in the House, so FDR turned to conservative Democrats and Republicans, who passed it.

This is all fine as far as it goes. But it’s worth remembering that FDR was very popular in his first year and his popular support grew in the off-year and then midterm elections. It’s fine to note that FDR built the New Deal in fits and starts and Obama is building his program in fits and starts. But one reason FDR was able to build on his successes until after 1936 election was that he had the people on his side. The elections (New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia etc) of the last year combined with the potential shellacking Democrats will take in November combine to paint a very different picture.

I can’t speak to all of the reasons that liberals are bummed these days, but one obvious one (at least to me) that Chait leaves out is the possibility that liberals really believed we were on the verge of a “new New Deal” and that Obama would deliver on his absurd, magical, rhetoric. Perhaps Chait’s cynicism protected him from such expectations. But I think progressives like Maddow and much of the lefty blogosphere really believed their own hype from, say, 2006-2008. They thought there was going to be a real, deep and generational realignment leftward (the “inflection point” Obama kept talking about). And while they are scoring major points (Obama’s successes are comparable to Reagan’s from a liberal perspective), it turns out that the public really doesn’t want a new New Deal. Tomasky’s comparison of Obama to FDR may be right (I’m skeptical) but ultimately it’s irrelevant because, while the American people wanted FDR to be FDR, they do not want Obama to be FDR. (Indeed, in what seems to be a first in over a century, the public doesn’t really want a big expansion of government during an economic crisis).

In short, governing is turning out to be a lot more work than a lot of liberals thought it was going to be because they didn’t win settle as many arguments as they thought they did.