Tag: Democrats

As with so many of the Presidents tactical actions there is more than meets the eye with this whole Boss Limbaugh (one of Mr. Oblermann’s best name coining’s to date)  imbroglio. There are those on the left that  are still suffering from eight years of Republican induced PTSD that are worried that we are elevating Boss Limbaugh to levels that will cause us trouble. They say, “Don’t feed the troll! Ignoring him is the best way.” Or “We have more important things to focus on”. The problem with this view is that they are ignoring the political situation and the gains that the Democratic agenda can make through tacitly encouraging this to continue.  

Way, way back in the heady days of the primary, before we knew who the Democratic nominee would be, while we were still duking it out for our respective favorite candidates, I wrote the following about Obama’s “big tent” style approach to politics:

This isn’t Clintonian triangulation. It’s actually worse than that. It’s unilaterally disarming before the first shot’s been fired.

and I quoted Ian Welsh when he said:

The time for the failed politics of compromise is over.

So, you’d think I’d be the last person sitting here defending Obama’s bipartisanship to the progressive left.

But that’s exactly what I find myself doing.

I’ve got hypocrisy on my mind, thanks to recent developments in the process of appointing officials to the Obama administration. First, Timothy Geithner, appointed to the position of national tax collector in chief, turns out to have failed to pay certain taxes. Then former Sen. Tom Daschle, the nominee to head Health and Human Services, turns out to have failed to pay much more. He wriggles and squirms a while under the spotlight but makes no move to step aside until a third nominee, Nancy Killefer, withdraws on principle over a much smaller sum of unpaid taxes, after which Daschle can’t stick around without looking like an utter tool.

And all this, to hear some speak, reflects badly on the incoming Obama administration, which was supposed to have been better than all this.

Well, yes, it does reflect badly.

But at the same time, it reminds me of a passage from Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age:

I wrote about progressive criticism of the stimulus plan last week:

Sen. Harkin: Obama’s Plan looks like “trickle-down”; Summers: “Message Heard, Loud and Clear”  (also, an earlier version on docudharma: https://www.docudharma.com/show…

The message was heard and is being acted on.  Barack Obama and his administration-to-be has been listening to Democrats and now is revising the stimulus plan.

Emerging from a two-hour meeting in the Capitol with Obama advisers Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, Senate Democrats praised the President-elect’s team for agreeing to make changes to its stimulus proposal based off of concerns senators raised last week at a meeting with the president-elect’s senior aides.

Politico: Big changes to Obama stimulus plan

More, after the fold

Original article, by Bill Van Auken, via World Socialist Web Site:

President-elect Barack Obama owes his victory, both in the Democratic primaries and the general election, in large part to the overwhelming hostility of the American people to the years of military aggression, torture, extraordinary rendition, domestic spying and all of the other crimes that will constitute the indelible legacy of the Bush administration.

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for providing the information on this action alert.

Republican-in-Spirit Joe LIEberman has supported Republican dictators and right-wing policies for some years now.  In 2006, after losing a primary election to challenger Ned Lamont, LIEberman told Connnecticut voters that their will was irrelevant; he would run for re-election as an independent.  Lamont made a series of missteps afterward, losing out to his extreme right-wing opponent in the general election.  Since then, LIEberman has sided with Republicans on virtually every policy issue and used his caucus status with Senate Democrats to force them to adopt his position on legislation favorable to his Republican masters.

Now that there is an undeniable Democratic majority in the Senate, that political party no longer needs to coddle him by letting him keep the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.  According to Greenwald, president-elect Barack Obama is taking the official position of staying the hell out of Senate affairs.  This creates the opening we on the left require to pressure the Senate to dump LIEberman.

Original article, by John Peterson, via Socialist Appeal (US):

The U.S. has elected a new president. On January 20, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. Along with the dramatic turn in the economic situation, this marks a definite turning point in the history of the country and of the world. On the streets across the U.S., you can feel a collective sigh of relief. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are on the streets of New York, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco, many of them dancing and even crying with joy. Young people drive by or ride their bikes through the streets yelling “Obama!” at passersby. Some have likened the celebration to New Year’s Eve, and people’s faces – especially young people and African-Americans – are glowing. These scenes have been repeated around the world, as frustration against Bush’s policies is unleashed. The world has not been a very pleasant place for the last 8 years.

This article is original to All Over the Board:

So, as I write this, tomorrow is the big day. The people of the US get to choose their next President. There’s a good quote on this over at Socialist Appeal (UK):

Also available in teal.

Every time I state my intention to vote, or that I have voted, for a write-in candidate for president I am blasted with vitriol about how I’ve wasted my vote, or that I’ve helped the Republicans win.  To that I say, “bullshit.”  Why do I say this?  I say it because it’s true.

We are told that our options are limited to a choice between “bad” and “worse.”  “Good” is denounced as “perfect,” the “enemy” of the “good,” but this overlooks the fact that no one expects or asks for “perfect.”  We want good politicians who will represent our interests in public office – that’s it.  We don’t expect miracles, or even success 100% of the time, but we do expect and demand that those we elect to power try their best.

It is a sick joke to be told that our votes for third party, independent, or write-in candidates are a waste, and it’s nothing short of fear-mongering to threaten a Republican victory if we don’t throw our principles out the window.  We’re lectured about how there is “too much at stake” in the current election cycle to vote our principles now, that we can vote our principles next time.  The best we can do, or so we’re told, is to vote for Democrats and hope they’re not as bad as the Republicans.

Again, this overlooks certain facts, chief among them being that there’s always going to be “too much at stake.”  That mythical “next” election cycle during which we shall be free to vote our beliefs and principles isn’t going to come as long as we continue to throw our votes away on politicians who represent the establishment and maintain the current regime.  What good does it do us on the left to compromise our principles if the result is always the same: bad politicians who support the status quo?

The strategy of electing “more and better” Democrats doesn’t work because we keep voting for the same corrupt politicians who say one thing but do another, namely, alienating progressives and disenfranchising voters.  As the last two years have shown us, we cannot hope to reform the Democratic Party from within because it has been thoroughly compromised by the lure of money and power.  The number of actual progressive Democrats shrinks every cycle, as the base wakes up to this fact and leaves the party.  It doesn’t help that the duopoly has the assistance of the corporate-owned media, which actively suppresses dissenting voices during campaign coverage.  This is illustrated by the marginalization and elimination of Democrats Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and John Edwards in last year’s debates.

This inevitably leads to weak corporate candidates such as Al Gore, John Kerry, and now Barack Obama for president.  Each of these politicians ran right-leaning campaigns against their hard right Republican counterparts, thus ensuring that voters would see little or no fundamental difference between them.  This, combined with weak campaigns that allowed the opposition to define the candidates, allowed the GOPhers to get just enough of the vote to steal the elections.  That the votes were so close in the first place speaks volumes about how low the Democrats have sunk in terms of putting up viable candidates; Gore and Kerry should have soundly defeated the shrub, by double digits, in their respective campaigns.  Instead, they ran so far to the political right that they turned off their party’s base.

Finally, there is the imperious attitude among partisan Democrats that none of this matters – it is up to the voters to shut up and go along, rather than the politicians listening to their employers and running effective, progressive campaigns.  That this turns off the base and drives it to look elsewhere for representation should have been a harsh wakeup call to Democrats to re-evaluate their core beliefs, failed strategies and tactics, and unearned sense of entitlement to non-Republican votes, but this hasn’t happened.

So we end up back where we began, on the losing end of elections that should have been in the bag.  If progressives are to break the cycle and have a chance of competing with the corporate duopoly, we must recognize that failed strategies must be abandoned.