Tag: liberals

This is an e-mail chain that some friends of mine ran off today in response to what has been happening with the Obama administration. It is unedited. Read on friends and enemies.

Bill:
I’m done. I’ve pulled the plug. I’m not listening to “America Left” on the radio, nor Maddow/Olbermann on the TV, and I’m just about done reading anything political, online or otherwise. This politics thing is ridiculous. Either Obama never was the candidate that I thought he was (and I wasn’t under any delusions that he was the 2nd coming of FDR), or Rahm/Geithner/Summers are holding his brain hostage. What good is his oration skills if there’s no follow thru? I just got done reading an article in on TPM about the filibuster, and as long as the minority is not paying a price for being obstructionist, there’s nothing stopping them from filibustering everything (which they have). Only the President has the bully pulpit to call them out on their obstruction, only the President has the power to call Lieberman out on his hypocrisy. What good was this wave of goodwill if you couldn’t use it to affect change? For him to ‘work behind the scenes’ allows the minority all the air time, and have allowed them to define all the issues, a rally here or there is not going to change the underlying meme in the media. “No Drama Obama” seems to means constantly capitulating to the minority, what with throwing the TSA and other nominees under the bus instead of calling wack-a-doo DeMint & Co. on their bullshit.

The R’s were on their backs last year, floundering in their own hypocrisy, lacking any kind of coherent message. Even now they’re the party of “No” but he media isn’t calling them on it. Not only are we in danger of a Republican takeover, but the R’s that are going to come into power are the fringe of the fringe.

Ridiculous. I was able to divert my angst by focusing on the Jets, and now that they’re done I suppose I will focus on the Mets (although somehow I think they’ll be just as frustrating as congress).

Hank:
Obama was never the candidate you thought he was, because he never was the candidate he pretended to be. In essence, he is Clinton-redux without the baggage that could have sunk Hillary’s campaign. I was hopeful, but never anticipated the kind of transformative approach to government he implied was in the offing.

A close reading of the campaign would remind us that he:

1) never intended to get out of Afghanistan and had always planned to escalate. That discussion was rigged from the start.
2) never intended to challenge the banks. He backed the first bailout without demanding the kind of restrictions on the financial industry needed to rein in its nonsense.
3) was more committed to a vague notion of bipartisanship than to any other principle. Healthcare, the environment, whatever, have all been sacrificed on the alter of his ambivalence toward any kind of ideological spine.
4) was far more of your standard pol than anyone wanted to believe. Forget the nonsense about him being a Chicago pol. That is irrelevant. He may have only been in the Senate for four years when he was sworn in as president, but he served as a state legislator and has been swimming in the cesspool of politics for quite some time.

None of this is to imply that someone else should have been elected — the options were better than in most years, but still terrible overall.

What has been most frustrating, however, is not that he’s done things we had no right to expect him not to do, but that he has completely ignored the progressive base in a way that calls into question his political acumen. He continues to reach out to the right (budget-cutting during a recession? Is he kidding?), even though rightwing voters would never back him or anyone from his party, while giving progressive Democrats and other lefty voters a reason to stay home. I am not asking him to match my borderline socialist beliefs — only Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich and maybe Russ Feingold could pull that off. Rather, I’d just like him to realize that his political survival and ability to make any meaningful reforms are dependent on keeping his base happy and active, that the independents will follow him if he can get some things done (which he can only do if he plays hardball with the GOP).

At the moment, he is looking far too much like Bill Clinton (without the sexual baggage) as he moves to the right and allows things to grind to a halt. Clinton may have been a two-term president, but his legacy is one of abject failure — he helped the Dems lose both houses of Congress, enacted a punitive welfare reform bill, deregulated the banks and the communications industry, kept Alan Greenspan at the Fed, and so on. Personally, I was hoping that the man who spoke so movingly of hope during the campaign would be something more than a repeat of the Man from Hope.

Bill:
I guess to your 2nd to last paragraph is where my frustration lies. I didn’t have rose colored glasses on, yes I admired the man but I knew the politician was a compromise. It’s the transactional handling of the whole situation that completely frustrates me. He’s willing to seemingly compromise with a party and that sees no need to compromise, compromises with the Conserva Dems of his own party, and constantly ignores any of the progressives, as if somehow they’re the pariah. I was really hoping that since he didn’t raised money outside of big business / pac / wallstreet, he wouldn’t be beholding to them. Give me something, some reason to feel hopeful, some reason to feel that ‘change’ was more than getting W and those idiots out of office.

Me:
But he did raise significant amounts from those areas — more in fact than Kerry raised in total in 2004 (just looked at these figures for a column). They made up a smaller portion of his fundraising than they did for any candidate in the past, but only because he raised more by himself from all sources in 2008 than Kerry and Bush raised together in 2004, which had been the record.

The problem in general is that the blueprint for what has happened was right there in the first chapter of his book, The Audacity of Hope, when he made turned the notion of post-partisan cooperation into an end in itself that would supplant any ideology or controlling philosophy.

Vince:
“Give me something, some reason to feel hopeful, some reason to feel that ‘change’ was more than getting W and those idiots out of office.”

Wasn’t THAT enough?

Me:
Getting rid of W was huge, but he was gone anyway. And not much has changed on the ground — what happened to the card-check union bill? closing Guantanamo? Restoring habeas corpus? Overturning Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act? The Copenhagen summit, which was only going to produce modest proposals in any case, has come and gone with nothing to show for it. We’re still waiting for a watered-down climate bill that is going to be watered down further, the banks are once again making record profits and handing out big bonuses even as unemployment hits 25-year highs and underemployment and those who have left the work force for good are at Depression-era levels. Bush is gone, but we still have Ben Bernanke and Bob Gates and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and administration officials defending the shredding of the constitution.

If all we can hope for our system is that we should be glad that things could be worse, we are in far more trouble than anyone is willing to admit.

Ken (joking):
I’m so sick of you liberal pinko’s and your incessant whining. You’re lucky the “real” Americans don’t line you up on a wall and execute you like you deserve.

Me:
Well said, sir. Well said.

Ken:
But seriously, what do you expect Mr. O to do? The dems don’t vote in lock step like the right does. The dems can’t even keep one radio station going. The country is broke so it’s almost pointless to have an agenda since we can’t afford to implement it.

Me:
Basically, stand up and take his lumps and force the right to do something, to show that it is something more than an obstructionist party. I cannot name one issue on which he’s stuck out his neck and shown himself willing to take the political hit. Even Clinton did that on occasion.As things stand, the administration went out of its way to play ball with the GOP, which allowed the party to seem — but only seem — as though it were involved in a real dialogue. I just don’t think that we would have seen the same kind of thing from FDR, Truman, LBJ or even Reagan.

I think the framing of the discussion — not just our little venting, but the discussion nationally — shows how broken the system is. We are willing to live with an unrepresentative Senate (Wyoming and California get the same number of senators? Not exactly one man, one vote) that is made even less representative and democratic because of an arcane supermajority rule. But we moan that a party that has a ridiculous, almost unprecedented majority cannot get anything done.

Instead of calling for reform of the Senate, the president negotiates with Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Instead of making the case that a minority representing an even smaller minority of citizens is holding things up and taht we need to end the charade, he kisses the ring of the pusillanimous Joe Lieberman and the Democrat in name only Ben Nelson. The entire thing is absurd.

I think Ken’s question, however, is on point: What did we expect Obama to do? Maybe we have to stop asking those kinds of questions and instead ask ourselves what we are prepared to make him and the rest of our elected officials do. I don’t want to sound like some kind of teapartier, but these guys do work for us; it is our government and the people in office were put there by us to do our bidding. If we want Obama to be bolder, we have a responsibility to create the space for him to be bolder. That has been the model the right has used for years — activism to the right of elected officials, capturing the public discussion and pulling elected officials to the right.

Wayne:
Katie and I watched “An Unreasonable Man” recently, a documentary about Ralph Nader. A lot of lefties demonize him, even those who used to work with him in his glory days of the 60s and 70s. But he did what he thought was right and necessary without regard to personal consequences. Everything I hear below suggests he was right and is right: the Democrats are not the answer: they’re just Pepsi instead of the Republicans Coke.

This political duopoly only lends itself to a sick kind of freak-show partisan reality TV, which is more like a sports event than a policy statement, and those accustomed and attracted to this arena are more likely to be self-serving than public-serving.

I’m not sure what the answer is except that the only real change comes from within. You can vote for a man who promises change, but that can never be enough for those who really hope to change ssomething.

I’m going to have Wayne have the last word because I think he hit it on the head.

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This is one of the better explanations of the disconnect between the Washington realists and the outside-the-Beltway idealist (yes, this is the Washington paradigm) that I’ve come across.

David Sirota, an activist, writer and now radio personality, has made a point of keeping his distance from Washington culture — which has resulted in him having the ability to see beyond the narrow framework that hamstrings progressive change in the capital.

The arguments we are hearing now, that progressives should leave the president alone, are remeniscent of the same arguments made during the two-term Clinton presidency, one of the least progressive on record (welfare reform, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA, GATT, the end of Glass-Steagall, Alan Greenspan, expansion of the federal death penalty — should I go on?). Clinton is better than the alternatives, except it was Clinton and not his conservative predecessors who managed to gut the social safety net and deal a fatal blow to the New Deal.

The argument coming from some Obama allies can be boiled down to two words: Grow up — which is pretty ridiculous and dangerously defeatist.

But, as Sirota points out, “you hear this kind of bullshit all the time.”

This is standard fare from from the Beltway insiders in The Chuch of the Savvy. Their catechism says that the public is naive and stupid to believe that a president will even try to deliver on the promises he/she made to voters as a candidate. And really, more than naive and stupid – but unrealistic and unserious, because there supposedly must be some sort of difference between what you tell voters you will try to do as president and what you can even attempt to do as president. We are expected to believe that those who don’t accept this aren’t patriotic believers in basic democracy, but actually like sad, petulant children who refuse “take off their pajamas and get dressed.”

It’s a canard, of course – one designed to justify selling out and betraying voters (in
this case, coming straight from a drug lobbyist). And the real problem with it beyond one or another issue is that it takes a big steaming shit on the entire concept of republican democracy. In that kind of system, we only get to choose our representatives once every two or four years. That forces us to rely on the campaign promises of those representatives as metrics for making our choices. Thus, if the entire idea of the campaign promise becomes an assumed joke, then we have zero metrics on which to elect our government.

There is no substantive reason why what a president cannot push what he promises on the campaign trail – especially when it comes to something like pharmaceutical reimportation, which every other industrialized country has legalized. I repeat – there is simply no substantive reason why a president cannot push what he has promised on the campaign trail. The platitudes from corporate lobbyists insisting that the alleged difference between “campaigning and governing” somehow absolves politicians from breaking their promise is deliberately designed to perpetuate the status quo.

There is another problem, which I focused on in my own column for The Progressive Populist, the danger of a personality-driven movement. I voted for Obama, but without any illusions. I said from the beginning that I thought he was too cautious, too much of a centrist and too Clinton-like, but that the other Democrats were worse and that his lofty, soaring rhetoric might generate a political change, bringing people into the process who had not been in it before.

That happened to a degree, but the cautious politician, the conciliator, returned following the election and opted for continuity rather than change. That wasn’t really a surprise.

The response to Obama’s make-nice approach, however, is disappointing: An apologist left has arisen that resembles the Bush backers to an uncomfortable degree. (I read an essay that made this point last week, that the kind of arguments being made by liberal Obama supporters essentially were no different than the “don’t criticize the president” nonsense pushed by Bush supporters, but I cannot for the life of me remember who wrote it. Please, e-mail me if the specific essay can be identified so I can give it proper credit).

The facts are these: Obama made certain promises — lifting the drug-importation ban, ending DADT and DOMA, getting us out of Iraq, make government more transparent, closing Gitmo — that he has either abandoned or hedged on. He has hired the most inside of Wall Street insiders to manage the economy (see Matt Taibbi’s piece makes clear). And he has allowed the healthcare debate to devolve to the point of it being nearly meaningless.

The left cannot sit back and say nothing, cannot just fall in line behind the president and support him blindly. Unless there is pressure from the left, he will continue the rightward drift we’ve witnessed, a drift made easier by the wind whipped up by a very vocal minority of tea-baggers on the right who have gotten much of the press attention.

If the left sits on its collective hands, then it will only prove that the harshest aspects of Chris Hedges’ critique of liberals is on the money (his essay is a must read and pretty accurate, if you ask me, if a little unforgiving of lefties who opted to vote for Democrats over Nader or McKinney).

Unless liberals stand up to the president and draw their own lines in the sand, unless they accept their responsibility for creating a moral imperative for ethical action, they will prove themselves to be as useless as they always have been.