Tag: Barack Obama

Obama and the neutered left

I had coffee at Small World in Princeton with Chris Hedges, who is working on a book about the decay and demise of liberal institutions, something he has written about frequently for Truthdig.com. During our conversation — there were several of us at the table talking about a lot of different things — he made the point that the pillars of liberal America (the press, the Democratic Party, labor, the church and the academy — forgive me if I have these wrong) were all in decay and that a corporate social structure has been growing up in their place.

The problem, he said, is our inability to deal with our state of permanent war and what it means for the American democratic experiment.

His argument — which is spot on, I think — comes at an interesting time, given that Barack Obama is in the White House. Barack Obama, the conventional wisdome asserts, represents a triumph of liberal politics, a black progressive in the White House who will push the nation leftward. But the Obama presidency has had the effect of neutering the reform impulse; the basic contours of the military-corporate state are not being challenged, but we continue to believe that Obama represents change, that we have entered a new era.

We haven’t. It is a mirage, a delusion. Real change has not come, nor is it likely to.

“The idea of Obama is what we want. The actuality is more mainstream.” — an anonymous Obama staffer quoted by Ben Austin in the June edition of Harper’s

The Obama presidency, much more than the presidency of George W. Bush and much like that of Bill Clinton, has badly damaged whatever progressive momentum may have existed during the two to three years before his ascension to the White House.

The reality, however, is far different as the nominal momentum created by the failures of the Bush White House following Hurricane Katrina, the banking failure and cratering economy, collapsing infrastructure (remember that bridge in Minnesota?), various Republican scandals and a general waning of support for war in Iraq and Afghanistan has dissipated in a fog of what can only be described as liberal incrementalism and a general lack of nerve.

The response to this on the left should be vibrant and aggressive protest, a shouting from the ramparts that makes it clear that much more is expected and much deeper change is required. Instead, we have witnessed a dangerous, ineffectual silence.

The questions is what happened. Why has the election of Barack Obama, the first black man to be elected president, not produced the liberal/progressive rebirth that some envisioned? Why is it that we have moved only nominally away from the policies of the Bush years?

There are three basic reasons, I think:

1. Racism. the fear of a black planet (to quote Public Enemy) has combined with the desperate economy and destruction of working class jobs to trigger the right-wing populist backlash. The Tea Party and the folks on the fringe who question the president’s place of birth are consistent with the historical narrative, with the kind of fear and loathing that rises up at times of unsettling change, a racist, xenophobic and hypernationalistic reactionism that can be likened to circling the wagons.

The visceral nature of the movement, which is really quite small, and its enthusiam have captured the media’s attention, captured its narrative, amplifying its message and forcing this right-wing reaction to be viewed as much greater than it really is. The result is a media narrative that portrays the nation as center-right and a pundit class that views everything through this distorted prism.

Given that the decision-makers in Washington — including the people in the administration — are more in tune with the Sunday talk shows and cable news than with what is happening beyond the Beltway, the result has been a natural drift rightward.

(I should add here that Obama’s rightward shift is not a surprise given his approach to issues during the campaign and his cynical dismissal of ideology in The Audacity of Hope.)

2. Obama’s sell outs. The list is endless, including everything from financial reform and health care to Guantanamo, the Kagan nomination and presidential power. Obama has, like Bill Clinton in the 1990s, shown that he views core beliefs as fungible, that passing legislation with cool names that can be sold as reform (and selling it is the goal) is all that matters. Real reform is secondary, if it is of any concern at all.

U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, following his Pennsylvania primary victory on Tuesday over the Obama-supported, Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter, summed up the problem this way (he was not speaking of Obama, but could have been): You make principled compromises in office, but you should never compromise your principles. I leave it to liberals to judge the Obama team on this point.

3. Sycophancy. This is pretty basic — and maybe the most damaging for the left. Too many on the left — and I am not talking about Thomas Friedman or Alan Colmes, folks who are viewed as liberals but are really just purveyors of status-quo ideas — have ceded their independence to a bankrupt Democratic Party establishment. Part of this stems from a messianic streak in our politics that assumes that one fine candidate will save us, that we do not have to do the hard work to defend democracy, that we can leave it to our leaders to fix it all.

That, of course, is absolute nonsense and no one should know that better than the left. Power concedes nothing without a fight and legislative victories can only be won after the people — that would be us — create momentum for change, a moral imperative, if you will.

But that is not what has happened since Obama took office. The messianic streak has only grown stronger even as the president continues to tack right on so many issues, with liberals falling silent. There are exceptions, of course, like Glenn Greenwald on Salon, The Progressive magazine, Chris Hedges and Robert Scheer on Truthdig.com, but they only prove the rule in this case.

Rather than the challenge, we often get the kind of arguments I hear from friends: Barack Obama is only doing what he can given the reality of Republican obstructionism; Barack Obama is a master tactician who is using incremental change to create greater change; Barack Obama is a closet progressive, just you wait and see; and on and on.

Obama, basically, gets no pressure from his left — no one is playing the role that the labor unions did during FDR’s administration (“make me do it,” FDR is purported to have told them, and they did) or that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, forcing civil rights onto the nation’s agenda. Without that pressure from the left — which should stand against a corporate-dominated politics and culture — the debate gets pulled farther and farther to the right, the incremental improvements become smaller and smaller, withering away to nothing.

And the only winners will be the corporations and their governmental enablers.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

More discussion of Obama and the court

Here is a message/comment chain from my Facebook page in response to yesterday’s post on Obama and the court. I thought it was worth sharing here (w/out the names):

1. I think ost of the Warren Court decisions were just fine, but there were occasions when they did indeed overreach in the name of a greater notion of justice.

2. I think Obama is mainly still responding to the Citizen United campaign finance opinion when he warns about judicial activism. He still doesn’t have a majority on the Court, and he still does in Congress, so encouraging deference to legislative intent is still in his political self-interest. We’ll see if the rhetoric changes after mid-term … See Moreelections and the death or retirement of a conservative Justice.

I do agree with 1. that there was some overreaching judicial activism on the left. On criminal procedure for example. That being said, I’m confident Obama will nominate a liberal who he believes supports Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, and campaign finance reform.

3. Not to mention the ability of the feds to do things like the healthcare bill.

Me: I think, in the end, he will nominate a perfectly useful liberal judge in the Clinton-appointee mold. But I don’t think we should let him off the hook for using conservative rhetoric and playing to a conservative argument. It is a dangerous gambit, if it is only tactical, and much more troubling if it is philosophical.

I think we also have to be … See Morecareful about the Stevens replacement because anything other than a true liberal — someone to the left of Breyer — would push the court to the right. And let’s face it, he is not going to have a shot at replacing a conservative until his second term, if he gets one. The next justice to go will be Ginsberg, most likely, meaning he will be in a position to replace the three most liberal justices on the court on the day he was sworn in.

That makes appointing a true liberal justice imperative.

Plus, and I think this is key, the court is a co-equal branch. It is not to usurp the legislative role, but it has a responsibility to ensure that any action taken by the other two branches — or by the states — meets the guidelines set out in the Constitution and the amendments. That gives the court, I think, the responsibility to overrule the legislature when the legislature overreaches — a point that no one ever seems to talk about. If the judiciary can overreach, so can the other two branches, as we learned to the nation’s detriment during the Bush years.

As for the 60s-70s courts, I’m not sure which specific criminal procedure rulings you’re talking about. You’ll have to be more specific.

And so it goes. Any other thoughts?

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

So much for the great liberal hope. Again.

There are only two explanations for what Barack Obama said this week about the Supreme Court: He believes that the court — and not just the current, rightwing incarnation, but the liberal court of the ’60s and ’70s — has been too activist in its approach, or he is attempting to defang the right as he moves to replace Justice John Paul Stevens.

Here is what he said on Air Force One on Wednesday about the court (I saw this initially on Glen Greenwald’s blog, but the quote is from the Atlanta Journal Constitution):

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I mean, here’s what I will say. It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically. And in the ’60s and ’70s, the feeling was, is that liberals were guilty of that kind of approach.

What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error. And I think rather than a notion of judicial restraint we should apply both to liberals and conservative jurists, what you’re seeing is arguments about original intent and other legal theories that end up giving judges an awful lot of power; in fact, sometimes more power than duly-elected representatives.

And so I’m not looking at this particular judicial nomination through that prism alone, but I think it is important for us to understand that judicial — the concept of judicial restraint cuts both ways. And the core understanding of judicial restraint is, is that generally speaking, we should presume that the democratic processes and laws that are produced by the House and the Senate and state legislatures, et cetera, that the administrative process that goes with it is afforded some deference as long as core constitutional values are observed.

Liberals need to read these comments closely. The president appears to be endorsing a very narrow view of the judiciary’s role, though it is possible he just chose his words without the requisite care. In any case, as Greenwald points out, the president should have been asked to explain what he meant and to offer examples of the kind of overreach he seems to be criticizing.

For liberals, this is important because the decisions made by the court in the 1960s and 1970s “form the bedrock of progressive legal thought regarding the Constitution and the Supreme Court,” and his comments are consistent with other cases in which he made a “typical effort to show how fair-minded he is by attacking the Dreaded Left.”

I’ve pointed this out before. Going after one’s base is foolish, but it is tried-and-true extablishment liberalism that dates back to the Clinton years, the willingness to sacrifice political principles to maintain some sort of legislative, electoral or public relations advantage. And it is something the president has proven himself adept at doing.

The problem, of course, is that doing so undercuts the very people who helped put him in office, which only contributes to the mix of apathy and anger out there that is moving us inexorably toward a political implosion. The scales used to address the big issues have been weighed down by a conservative thumb.

But that in and of itself is not the only criteria by which I’m making selections on judges.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Letter to liberales

Another day, another disappointment for progressives (this time, oil drilling), another reason to stop pretending that the Obama administration is something that it’s not.

 

Consider this an open letter to my liberal comrades, those who still believe that Barack Obama offers the kind of hope he promised during his campaign. He is better than the alternatives were, at least the major party candidates, but he is proving not to be a transformational president. In fact, he is nothing more than a milder, more liberal version of Bill Clinton, a member of the corporate status quo interested only in tinkering around the edge.

 

Liberal friends, as yourself these questions. Would you support a candidate who:

  • expanded health coverage nominally by funnelling money to the insurance industry?
  • signed an executive order endorsing a ban on the use of federal funds for abortions?
  • expanded the war in Afghanistan and left much of the war in Iraq in place?
  • opened off-shore areas to oil drilling?:
  • supports the foolish notion that coal, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet, can be made clean and green?
  • defens the state secrets act, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition and other dubious, constitutionally suspect practices used in the war on terror?
  • focused on budget cutting and deficit reduction when job creation demands a bigger stimulus?

 Would you support a candidate who, at nearly every turn, thumbs his nose at your core beliefs, who views your support as a given and takes you for granted? Should you?

 

You want to say “no,” but you would be lying to yourself, your continued, unquestioning loyalty to the president regardless of his actions is proof of the lie. Yes, Obama is better than McCain, Palin, even Hillary Clinton, but that is not enough, should not be enough.

 

Core principles matter. We have to show the president and Congress what our core principles are and make it clear they have to respect them, take them seriously and start building policy based on our core principles and not those of the corporate order.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Drill, baby, drill

The way to address our energy needs is not to drill, but to alter our energy needs, to conserve and find alternative sources.

And yet, President Barack Obama announced a plan today to open more land to drilling with this contradictory claim:

“There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision, including those who say we should not open any new areas to drilling,” Mr. Obama said. “But what I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy.”

So, according to the president, we are going to move from an economy that runs on fossil fuels to on that runs on newly drilled fossil fuels? Is the only goal to reduce dependence on foreign oil? Or is it to move away from greenhouse-gas-producing fuel sources?

But this may not be about clean energy at all. As the Times story suggests, this may have been more about prospecting for votes for a relatively weak climate change bill, the benefits of which may end up being offset by the damage done to our oceans — will a rather paltry amount of oil to show for our efforts.

Oil company executives and geologists expressed guarded enthusiasm for the president’s initiative. But experts said it was impossible to know how much oil and gas the new tracts contain, in part because some existing data is based on 30-year-old studies.

Even at the high end of government estimates, the new production, if and when it occurs, will displace only a small fraction of the oil and gas the country now imports and consumes.

And that just seems a bad tradeoff and should make the voters who viewed Obama as a savior question their allegiance to him, a point made by Frank Tursi, a preservationist with the North Carolina Coastal Federation:

“It all leaves the president with a delicious irony and that is: In order to garner support for a bill that is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the administration is willing to expand the very substance that causes those emissions in the first place,” Mr. Tursi said. “Pandering for votes that rely on a polluting fuel of the past is not the kind of change many of us expected.”

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.