The progressive conundrum: To back #Obama or not

We are five days out from what has been disingenuously called the most significant election in our history. The polls show a close race, with the incumbent, President Barack Obama, leading the electoral vote.

The focus now is on campaigning, on the electoral machines and the count.

The question we should be asking, however, is this: What impact will this election have on the major issues facing the nation and the world? The answer, unfortunately, is not a lot.

On the most serious issues we face — global warming, income inequality, economic stagnation, the impact of decayed infrastructure, and the corporatization and militarization of our society — the parties differ very little. There are differences, to be sure, on abortion and women’s rights and gay rights, but not much beyond this.

Should we be surprised? Not really. Obama, when he ran in 2008, made it pretty clear that he was a centrist — he backed the Wall Street bailout, supported clean-coal (a pipe dream, at best) and nuclear power, called Afghanistan the good war, backed telecom immunity and so on. And he has governed as he promised, for the most part, though he has been more conservative in foreign policy than we might have expected.

He is, at best, an Eisenhower Republican (establishment-focused) running against a shape-shifter who has claimed to be a “severe conservative” and has moved back and forth across the moderate-to-conservative spectrum for the last five years.

So what is a progressive to do? That’s not an easy question. Chris Hedges and Matt Stoller advocate a third-party vote, which they say would help generate the mass movement and resistance necessary to wrest control of the country from the corporate oligarchs. I’m not sure this is going to work. As I wrote earlier this week, the likely outcome would be a Romney win and a bloodletting on the left — remember the opprobrium heaped on Ralph Nader in 2000? — that would leave us with a more conservative court and possibly an unleashed Republican majority in Congress (this is more doubtful).

Daniel Ellsberg takes the opposite tack — he says that, if you live in a swing state, you should vote for Obama because “It is critical to prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.”

This not a contest between Barack Obama and a progressive—primary challenger or major candidate—or even a Republican who’s good on foreign policy and civil liberties like Ron Paul or Gary Johnson. What voters in a handful or a dozen close-fought swing states are going to determine on November 6 is whether or not Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years.

A Romney/Ryan administration would be no better on any of the constitutional violations I mentioned, or on anything else. But it would be catastrophically worse on many other important issues: The likelihood of attacking Iran, Supreme and Federal Court appointments, the economy and jobs, women’s reproductive rights, health coverage, the safety net, green energy and the environment.

He says there is “long-term merit for our movement in registering a large protest vote against both major candidates and in favor of a truly progressive platform.” That protest, he said, should take place in the “almost 40 non-swing states” where it “can be done without significant risk of affecting the electoral votes of those states or the final outcome in favor of the Republicans.” In the swing states “decisions by relatively small numbers of progressives to vote for a third party or not to vote at all would risk and might well result in a Republican triumph.”

This election is a toss-up. That means this is one of the uncommon occasions when we progressives—a small minority of the electorate—could actually determine the outcome of a national election. We might swing it one way or the other by how we vote and what we say about voting to fellow progressives in the battleground states.
Given that third party candidates with genuinely progressive platforms are on the ballots of most of these swing states, their supporters—who might successfully encourage those with the same values to vote for Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson instead of Obama—could well provide the margin for Romney that would send him to the White House.

If, to the contrary, such voters in those states could be convinced  to overcome their disinclination to vote for Obama, they could crucially block the far more regressive agenda of the Republican Party.

Our task is clear. The only way to block Romney/Ryan from office is to persuade enough people in swing states to vote for Obama—not stay home or vote for someone else.  And that has to include progressives and disillusioned liberals who are inclined not to vote at all or vote for a third-party candidate (because like me, they’re not just disappointed but disgusted and even enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and will probably keep doing).

What Ellsberg is arguing for is not blind support for Obama — that would be both foolish and dangerous and is partly what has been responsible for the weakness of the Obama administration to date — but for a strategic use of the ballot and a distinction between voting and organizing that gives more power to the organizing side of the mix.

We will be better off with Obama in the White House, but only if we remember to challenge him at every turn.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet