Why The American Democratic Party is Driving Me Nuts

The only big things I care about in domestic politics are:
1. Affordable Healthcare/Free Healthcare
2. Living Wage

And I always considered these things to be pretty "liberal" issues. Still I just don't hear a lot of talk about it, I don't see much political action. In the democratic party's effort to try and attract more conservative voters, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Couldn't they cede a less important issue? And aren't all issues less important than healthcare? Why not make welfare stricter, disqualify some of those who don't deserve it in a hard audit, and then use that money to say, reduce the cost of healthcare across the board about about 5-10%?
All I see is the whining. The Democrats don't seem to put much in the way of constructive action forward, they just seem to play moral police every time anyone republican does something conservative(which, by the way, should not shock them nearly as much as it does.) All they do is react with a continuous level of "outrage" that I'm really starting to doubt is much more than theatrics.(Nancy Pelosi?)
They've had every possible chance so far to capitalize on the negative publicity surrounding the presidency and the majority whip scandals. What do they do? Sure as hell not anything very effective.
On a more grassroots level, Adbusters Magazine and the like are just that much more a manifestation of how the left in the U. S. is just wasting it's time and vital energy. So much young energy at their command, and the magazine reccomends not, say, building affordable housing, starting a farmer's market, or an employment agency for homeless people, but rather, that their readers black out logos on all surfaces in their daily life. They seem to have lost all the left's good will toward humanity, and replaced it with scorn and hostility for a world which voted Republican. They enjoy being the "morally superior" underdog, instead of helping people, they just complain about what has been done to them.
In short, I think that they've just gotten too comfortable with the role of minority and made themselves unfit for being a majority because of it. They've become too comfortable being convinced the world is going to hell, and they've started to enjoy this decline because it gives them something new to whine about or react to. I'm really starting to think that a total corporate dystopia would make the average Adbusters reader or Michael Moore fan happiest, because they would be able to say "I told you so" and then feel like a revolutionary all the more.

And then theres that problem where criticism from the inside of the left provokes total outrage.