Et tu, Barack?

Democrats swept the 2006 elections on a promise to end the war and pull the United States back from a precipitous decline in world opinion. And while one cannot fault House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the handful of liberal progressives who have consistently fought to realign the nation’s political character, the hardcore liberal base in California is losing patience. According to a Field Poll released Friday, the approval rating for Congress among California voters has “fallen below 30 percent for only the seventh time in the past 15 years.” As John Hill of the Sacramento Bee reports,

Both Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who became speaker this year, and Congress as a whole have fallen short of voter expectations since taking over both houses, poll director Mark DiCamillo said.

“I think the reason for her decline and the low ratings Congress is getting is that voters here are not seeing any change,” DiCamillo said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s approval rating of 51 percent is down 10 percentage points since March, but consistent with her average over the years. Sen. Barbara Boxer’s rating also has slumped, from 54 percent in March to 44 percent. Both Boxer and Feinstein, however, still enjoy the approval of more voters than disapproval of them.

For Pelosi, it was the first time the poll showed more people disapproving than approving of her performance – 40 percent to 35 percent, with 25 percent having no opinion.

What Californians are waking up to is the reality that while Pelosi may be the standard bearer of liberal values in the Democratic Party, the nation’s political pendulum has shifted so far to the right that she is merely a symbol. The economic elite of this country know the value of having Pelosi as a figure head. It gives the impression of an authentic political spectrum. But all we have to do is look at the Dem Presidential contenders - based on fundraising - to get a real bell weather on where liberals like her, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer figure into the national scene.

Forget Hillary for a moment, though I am more than confident at this point that the power base in the DNC is going to give her the nomination. And it’s looking increasingly like the Obama camp feels the same way. After a terrible week - in which he outraged true blue liberals by failing to remove the anti-gay evangelizer Donnie McClurkin from his tour (homosexuality is a “curse”) - Obama pledged a revitalized mission to take Clinton on more forcefully. But what does this mean? Well, it means adopting more right-wing rhetoric to woo the attention of the real money. But this is only further upsetting the people over at DailyKos and other liberal blogging sites. As one blogger summed it up:

There are a lot of Democrats who worry that Clinton is too mainstream, too… Republican. They want someone to challenge her forcefully from the left, and they want Obama to be that person. They want Obama to be a proxy for them, for their frustration at how wildly far to the right they think the country has pulled in the last eight years.

Naturally, a lot of these people are gay or gay-friendly liberals. Naturally, these people have bad memories of the last presidential campaign and all its gay-baiting and homophobe embracing. Obama needs these people, and a lot of them are naturally drawn to him (or to an idealized vision of him), but here’s what he’s done lately to win them over:

First, he ran a campaign that failed to mount a forceful challenge to Clinton’s candidacy. Then he promised he would get tougher against Clinton and point out where his positions are actually more in line with liberal values than hers. And then, within the span of a day, he proved not even tough enough to yank an anti-gay voice from one of his campaign’s own events, infuriating liberals all over the country.

If Obama’s not tough enough to defend the interests and beliefs of left-leaning Democratic voters at his own events, why should these people now believe that he’s tough enough to successfully take on Clinton? More importantly: Why should they believe he’s any different than Clinton?

More sophisticated Dems are looking past this little tussle over McClurkin and hoping that Obama will make stands where it does count. As Josh Marshall wrote:

If Obama is looking for an issue where the politics and the substance both point in the same direction it’s sitting right in front of him: Iran.

In front of everyone’s eyes we are creeping toward a catastrophic replay of the mistakes the country made half a decade ago in Iraq. You hear the same arguments — ‘time is not on our side,’ etc. All nonsense. Even among the ’sensible’ people on this issue the common assumption is that yes, eventually we may need to go to war. But we need to give more time to diplomacy, etc. This is all nonsense and it’s a set of shared assumptions that now appears to unite Hillary with all the Republican candidates. At least that’s one way to interpret her recent remarks. This is an issue that goes to the heart of America’s future role in the world. And it’s an issue that could work for him. Or someone, if they’d pick it up and start talking sense.

Anyone asking Nancy Pelosi?