One of the reasons...

...I became an Obama supporter in 2008 was that I got tired of living in the make-believe libertarian la-la land that existed only in my head. In the midst of two losing wars and a cratering economy, it was time to grow up and get serious. I still think Obama is one of the few people on the political scene who can lead us out of this mess.

But while the right wing has been a pain in the rear end from the get-go, liberals are now getting into the act. (Republicans, as you may remember, made a strategic decision back in early 2009 to oppose everything Obama proposed and then just hope and pray that the economy wouldn't recover by 2010. So far it looks like their strategy has worked, although I still think they're headed for disaster in 2012.)

Whatever. But what's really starting to irritate me is that some liberals have run out of patience with the president. Maybe Robert Gibbs wasn't just posturing the other day when he complained about the "professional left." In today's Times, Robert Herbert says:

Mr. Obama’s problem — and the nation’s — is that in the midst of the terrible economic turmoil that the country was in when he took office, he did not make full employment, meaning job creation in both the short and the long term, the nation’s absolute highest priority.

I am so sick of hearing that! What does Herbert think the $787 billion stimulus package was for? The president signed the largest stimulus bill in history within a month of his inauguration with the support of only three Republican senators.

Herbert goes on:

Besides responding to the nation’s greatest need, job creation would have been the one issue most likely to bolster Mr. Obama’s efforts to bring people of different political persuasions together. In the early months of 2009, with job losses soaring past a half-million a month and the country desperate for bold, creative leadership, the president had an opportunity to rally the nation behind an enormous “rebuild America” effort.

Such an effort, properly conceived, would have put millions to work overhauling the nation’s infrastructure, rebuilding our ports and transportation facilities to 21st-century standards, establishing a Manhattan Project-like quest for a brave new world of clean energy, and so on.

We were going to spend staggering amounts of money in any event. There was every reason to use those enormous amounts of public dollars to leverage private capital, as well, for investment in projects and research that the country desperately needs and that would provide enormous benefits for many decades. Think of the returns the nation reaped from its investments in the interstate highway system, the Land Grant colleges, rural electrification, the Erie and Panama canals, the transcontinental railroad, the technology that led to the Internet, the Apollo program, the G.I. bill.

The problem with the U.S. economy today, as it was during the Great Depression, is the absence of sufficient demand for goods and services. Consumers, struggling with sky-high unemployment and staggering debt loads, are tapped out. The economy cannot be made healthy again, and there is no chance of doing anything substantial about budget deficits, as long as so many millions of people are left with essentially no purchasing power. Jobs are the only real answer.

President Obama missed his opportunity early last year to rally the public behind a call for shared sacrifice and a great national mission to rebuild the United States in a way that would create employment for millions and establish a gleaming new industrial platform for the great advances of the 21st century.

Talk about la-la land! I repeat, Obama passed the largest stimulus bill in history with the support of only three Republican senators. It was the biggest bill possible.

Let's get real, everybody. Obama probably saved the nation with the stimulus, got universal health care passed (which had been a goal of presidents since Theodore Roosevelt) and signed the most far-reaching financial regulatory reform since the New Deal. That's not bad for his first year-and-a-half on the job.

Oh, and you Republicans? You'd better get used to this guy being around for a while. Because unless you come up with a candidate -- and I don't mean Sarah Palin -- Obama will be in the White House until 2017.