THE SECOND WAY IS JUST AS UNPOPULAR AS THE FIRST:

A few months ago, Terry O'Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, summed up the state of the left. "We're winning the politics," she told me. "But on policy, we're just getting killed."

On the one hand, a handily reelected liberal president; demographic trends turning more and more states blue, with no end in sight; growing public support for liberal causes like gay marriage; and a fractured, warring, dismally unpopular opposition. On the other hand, a failure on the national level to consider even modest changes to environmental, immigration, or gun policy; a federal government that, rather than growing to serve more people, has been subject to draconian cuts. On the state level, a drumbeat of assaults on collective bargaining, restrictions on access to abortion, cuts to education, taxes, and social services, and curbs to voting rights. After 20 elementary-school children died in last year's gun massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, more states sought to expand access to guns than to constrain it.

Progressives are trapped in a frustrating dichotomy: a feeling that even though they're winning the public argument, their policy ideas are largely an irrelevant pipe dream.

Nowhere was this more evident than at a policy summit convened Thursday by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank hatched by Clinton Administration alums during the dark days of the first George W. Bush Administration. A star-studded lineup of Democratic power players took the stage: former Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State John Kerry, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And yet their speeches and discussions were suffused with a sense of futility.

"We know what we have to do. It's pretty straightforward," Glenn Hutchins, a private-equity investor and former Clinton White House adviser, said from the dais toward the end of a panel on economic growth. Investments in education, infrastructure, research and development--all the types of government outlays that have been slashed by the recent federal "sequestration" cuts. "But we can't do it," Hutchins added. "We have a huge governing problem. So we're stuck .... Some of these discussions have the air of surrealism. We know what we have to do; we can't do it."

Question after question from the audience echoed Hutchins's angst. "I'm looking for hope given the obstruction we face from this conservative Congress," pleaded one. "How can this message get out in the public debate and be accepted?" asked a second. Larry Summers, the former Obama economic adviser and Federal Reserve runner-up, said of the sputtering recovery, "I don't think the problem is with financial engineering. The problem is political will."

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