Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it). The truth may well be neither, but after a decade of being spun silly, Americans can’t be blamed for being cynical about any leader trying to sell anything. As we say goodbye to the year of Tiger Woods, it is the country, sad to say, that is left mired in a sand trap with no obvious way out. Frank Rich
I don't think Obama is either covertly anti-American or spineless. To believe he is spineless is to believe that refused to stand by his progressive principles, which, it's clear now, he doesn't have. It's not lack of presidential principle or resolve that has given us this corporate healthcare giveaway, but his embrace of corporatist political philosophy, which aligns with the corporatism that dominates in the Senate. It's clear this is the bill that Emmanuel/Obama wanted from the beginning.
I've called him gutless. Was that a fair characterization? How can you call someone gutless who got what he wanted? And having guts is not something that plays well within the Beltway, unless you're a fire-breathing rightwinger. Howard Dean is what you get in a progressive politician with guts–bluntly honest, what you see is what you get–and that is abhorrent to the Beltway aesthetic–very unpresidential. A progressive with guts by definition is an irrelevancy. It means, if you're president, you cannot govern, because effective Liberal governance has come to mean doing what you're told. Resist, and you will be destroyed. Why would Obama choose to be an irrelevancy?
Maybe Obama was more progressive before 2006, but two years in the Senate flushed out of his system whatever progressivism might have been there. Some of it lingered in his rhetoric during the campaign, and it served to differentiate him from his more openly corporatist opponent, Hillary Clinton. But by the time he took office, his choices for chief of staff, economic advisers, justice, and national security sent a very strong message that he was Bill Clinton redivivus.
As was true for Clinton, so for Obama: the progressive wing of the party is a problem to be managed rather than a political force for him to work with and draw upon. Too bad. I think he could have marshaled that energy and forged a realignment that would have redefined the center, but it would have taken a boldness that we were wrong to think he had. He took the safer route and decided to play by the existing rules than to try to change them. In that sense my characterization of Obama's refusal to rise boldly to a historic challenge is gutless. But that's probably too harsh. I think it's unfair to blame someone for not being heroic. You admire heroism as extraordinary, but you can't expect it of anyone. But we were not wrong to hope for it. And it's not wrong to be disappointed that the cynics were right about him.
So did Obama pull a Tiger-like scam? I don't think so. He just projected a lot of dots onto the screen of our collective consciousness, and we connected them in different ways depending on our hopes and fears. I can't blame him for that; it's what all politicians do. He just did it in a way that stimulated hopes at a particularly critical time in our national development. Is our disappointment justified? Yes. Should we have known better? I don't think so. It's not a disappointment in him as an individual politician so much as a disappointment rooted in having our worst fears about what we're becoming confirmed, viz., a neo-feudal, corporatist oligarchy.
If you think phrases like 'neo-feudalism' are over-the-top exaggerations, or if you don't see why this trend is a problem, then you can embrace this HCR bill as a flawed, but historic accomplishment. But if you see it the way I do, this bill confirms that we now live in a society in which, even when Dems–the so-called political Left–are in power, the public interest is secondary to corporate interests. We live in a society now in which the public can expect only crumbs tossed its way when the corporations, the new lords of the realm, write the legislation, which is then rubber-stamped into law by a weak, collaborationist Dem president and congress. That should be fairly upsetting.
Nevertheless, if I were in the Senate I'd vote for the bill, not because it doesn't fill me with disgust, but because voting 'No' doesn't change anything, and some people need those crumbs.
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SUNDAY PM UPDATE: Just watched the DVR of Moyers' Friday show with Taibi and Kuttner. Kuttner's articulates exactly my hope and my disappointment in Obama's failure to rise to the historical moment:
And one hoped because of the depth of the crisis and the disgrace of deregulation and ideology, and the practical failure of the Bush presidency, this was a moment for a clean break. The fact that even at such a moment, even with an outsider president campaigning on change we can believe in, that Barack Obama turned out to be who he has been so far, is just so revealing in terms of the structural undertow that big money represents in this country. The question is: Is he capable of making a change — he's only been in office less than a year — in time to redeem the moment, redeem his own promise?
As Taibi pointed out, what's the evidence that he will redeem his own promise? That he's a decent, smart, likable guy? The only thing that might drive him to it is what I described the other day as a gamechanger.
I also found particularly right-on Kuttner's closing comments:
I think there are periods of American history when the political system rises to the occasion. It certainly did with the civil rights movement. It certainly did in the 1930s. But there's no guarantee that it's going to come out the way it needs to come out. So I wouldn't give up on the political system. I mean, you have to keep fighting and working to rebuild democracy. Democracy is the only possible counterweight to concentrated financial power. And ideally, that takes a great president rendezvousing with a social movement. One way or another, there is going to be a social movement. Because so many people are hurting, and so many people are feeling correctly that Wall Street is getting too much and Main Street is getting too little. And if it's not a progressive social movement that articulates the frustration and the reform program, you know that the right wing is going to do it. And that, I think, is what ought to be scaring us silly.
Exactly. Obama/Emmanuel and the New Dems are playing with fire insofar as they are giving the country plenty of evidence that they are collaborating with the bad guys. That works for purposes of expediency in the short-term, but it's loading the gun that will eventually be used by the right to blast away at the Dems. And the populist Right will be right, and the Dems will be wrong. The crazies on the Right will be telling it as it is, and progressive will be forced to defend corporatist Dems for fear of empowering the Right, whose critique they essentially agree with. As Taibi pointed out on Moyers, this is a gift that will keep on giving to the Right for years to come.
BTW, Kuttner answered a question I've been wondering about: How many seats do New Dems control? He said there are 40 Democratic senators and 200 Dem House Reps who are not corporate Dems. In other words, a third of the senate Dems and a fifth of the House Dems are New Democrats/Blue Dogs. That is clarifying, for me at least. Forty Republicans plus twenty New Democrats/Blue Dogs equals the real filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
According to Wikipedia, there are 14 New Democrat Senators: Blanche Lincoln (AR, founder), Dianne Feinstein (CA, by 2001), Thomas R. Carper (DE, by 2001; co-chair from 2003), Joe Lieberman (CT, founder), Bill Nelson (FL, by 2001), Evan Bayh (IN, founder), Mary Landrieu (LA, founder, co-chair from 2003), John Kerry (MA, from 2000[7]), Debbie Stabenow (MI, by 2001), Kent Conrad (ND, from 2000), Ben Nelson (NE, by 2001),Tim Johnson (SD, from 2000), Maria Cantwell (WA, by 2001), Herb Kohl (WI, from 2000).
Some are worse than others. Maria Cantwell from my state, whom I have found to be rather odious, might redeem herself with her attempts to get tough on the banks, but I'd like to see her challenged by a progressive in her next primary in 2012. And I will work to support that challenge to the best of my ability.
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