July 23, 2011

• the obama mistake

  A funny thing happened these past three years of the reign of “hope” and “change”.  On the right there was a message told again and again and again with perfect consistency. Obama is as liberal as you can get. He’s a radical, left wing, ideological madman. He’s a communist. He’s a socialist. He’s a maoist. He’s a fascist. Even though none of those things are the same, it hardly mattered. The message was clear. Obama is *not* one of us. He’s one of THEM. He’s an outsider. he’s destroying this great nation with his anti-Reaganism and his big government commie liberalism.

  That side of the debate was consistent.  There was no evidence for it but the argument never deviated no matter what happened. It wasn’t based on FACT. It was based on feelings. The feelings of a people who were thrust out of power for failing miserably striking back at the new regime.

  But on the Left and the center of the country things were much more muddled. The yearning to push back against the utterly FALSE narrative of the Right, the way we always do, was at war with the undeniable fact that the same president who wasn’t a radical Leftist also wasn’t doing anything remotely resembling what we WANTED him to do, or what he promised he would do.

  This conflict was hard to cope with. I saw tons of different reactions to it.  Some decided to go the route of Blind Faith. They said to themselves, “I believe in Obama and while I don’t quite understand why he’s doing the things he’s doing I trust him to know more than I do and that he means well in the end.”  Others went the route of ever increasing rage at the Republicans. They said “Obama isn’t doing the things we want him to do but it’s because of those DAMNED Republicans! Standing in the way of everything, always blocking, always plotting to undermine and destroy his Presidency! I will place all my rage and anger at them! If it weren’t for them, he’d surely be the great President I always imagined him to be!”

  Others went a different route that was less forgiving of the President, but it was still an attitude based on excuses.  Some imagined that the President was just not a fighter. Others that he wasn’t good at negotiating. Others that he wasn’t brave or that he didn’t have the strength of his convictions. Some said he picked poor advisers or stupid advisers or advisers who were secret moles working for the Republicans. Some said he was too inexperienced. Some even suggested he was not very intelligent. Some said he was too stubborn. Some said he was too much of a professor. Others that he wasn’t enough of a professor. Others that he wasn’t a good politician. And that he was too easily pushed around by Republicans. Some said he didn’t use the bully pulpit enough. Some said he didn’t gather the people to his cause. Some said he needed to make his CASE more. Some said we expected too much.

  Still others didn’t know what to think or say. They just expressed their extreme sadness and sense of DISAPPOINTMENT with Obama. Almost treating him like he was a wayward kid who is goofing off in school.

  But the President isn’t our child or our parent to be disappointed with or proud of. He’s the President. He’s the most powerful political figure in the country. And he got there through hard work and dedication when nobody would have expected it would have even been possible for someone so young, so inexperienced, and so.. well… black. It’s hard to imagine that someone who can do THAT, who can get the people behind him all over the country is stupid or bad at politics or a poor negotiator or any of the other excuses people came up with to explain his actions.

  Now, finally I think in the blogosphere at least and I think amongst many other liberal communities amongst those who have been paying close attention, consensus is building and the reality is seeping through to people.

  In the latest negotiation over the debt ceiling the blinders were lifted. When people saw that it was President Obama who put social security and medicare at risk for fundamental changes and painful cuts even when the Republicans hadn’t even bothered to do that, it was like a light bulb going off in people’s heads all over the world.

  People were no longer able to deny it. Ahh now we see. Obama actually IS as brilliant, as capable, as intelligent, as politically savvy as we thought he was. He’s actually quite GOOD at his job. He’s quite effective and strong and goes all out to fight for what HE believes in. What he thinks is right for the country. He’s negotiating the best possible hand given his circumstances to achieve the ends he seeks.

  The problem is…. those ends aren’t OUR ends.

  Not the ends of Liberals.

  Not the ends of Progressives.

  Not the ends of Unions.

  Not the ends of working people.

  Not the ends of people suffering under the hardships of this economy.

  No. The truth is, President Obama isn’t in any way an ideological foil for Bush-era Republicans that dragged our country through Hell for eight years. In fact, quite the opposite. He AGREES with them on many, many things. He might not be a Conservative. He comes at it from a different perspective. But that perspective is still totally contrary to the way most people on the Left, most people who call themselves Democrats or Liberals or Progressives or POPULISTS come at the problems the nation faces. 

  And so there’s only one conclusion you can really draw. It’s not just that Obama is not a Radical Liberal. It’s that he doesn’t even BELIEVE in Liberalism. Not at all. He doesn’t want a balance between the best ideas of Liberals and the best ideas of Conservatives. He doesn’t think Liberals HAVE any good ideas. He thinks the old school systems like habeas corpus and single payer and social security and Glass Steagall are just that… old. Quaint. Dumb. They don’t fit his view of what society needs in the modern era. Believing in them makes you a rigid ideologue in Obama’s book. 

  I’m sure there are a lot of people who consider themselves on the Left that agree with Obama about all of this. Particularly a lot of young people who seem to be being taught this new ideology from the political leadership of the Democratic party. They call themselves “liberals” or “progressives” too sometimes. But their brand of liberalism doesn’t match up with the historical brands of Left wing politics from FDR to Johnson to Martin Luther King. It’s something NEW. It’s something different. And it’s something I find myself as utterly philosophically opposed to as I am to ideological Conservatism. And most of the Left wing blogosphere seems to be realizing now that they are just as opposed to it.

   

  Taking a step back… What is at the heart of this philosophical disagreement we have? What makes this divide between these two factions of the Democratic party exist? I have a lot of thoughts on this but by and large I think that at its core there is a difference of opinion about what the biggest problems our nation faces. What I think Obama believes, and I think you can see it in a lot of his rhetoric and actions, is that the biggest problem in our society is the inability of Government to form concensus. He thinks the problem is that the Left and the Right can’t get along. He’s think the poisonous battle between radical extreme Republican Conservatives and radical extreme Democratic Liberals is destroying the nation. And he sees himself as a Lincoln type figure who is trying to forge a compromise between the two sides before there is another civil war. And he’ll do almost anything to achieve that unity. Even if it means a lot of people have to suffer in the mean time.

  That’s not how I see it. I don’t think the biggest problem is Democrat vs Republican, Conservative vs Liberal. I think by far and away the BIGGEST problem is POWERFUL vs WEAK. It’s the RICH vs the POOR. It’s the people so high up on the totem poll of society that they can’t even see us poor pitiful people underneath and don’t understand how their games effect us. 

  Now why do I think that?

  Because it wasn’t conservatives or liberals who created the financial crises and the housing crash. It was BOTH.

  Because it wasn’t republicans or democrats who voted for war in Iraq. It was BOTH.

  Because it wasn’t members of the right or the left who misled the nation on weapons of mass destruction. It was BOTH.

  I can go on and on and on with this. Warrantless wiretapping. Targeted assassinations. Indefinite detention. Afghanistan. Libya. Destruction of Labor laws. Limitations on abortion rights. Draconian requirements for citizenship for illegal immigrants. The war on drugs.

  In fact it was in all cases the same elites and powerful figures in both parties who come to agreement again and again to make decisions that are destructive to the middle class and the poor and seem to always keep the CEOs of major companies pouring in the record profits while income disparity continued to rise.

   

  I think we made a mistake. Every one of us who were on the Left who voted for Obama thinking he would bring “hope” and “change” like he said over and over again made a terrible terrible mistake.  The mistake wasn’t voting for Obama. That was still the right decision. He was and is still the lesser of the two evils.

  The mistake was not listening to the advice of Noam Chomsky who wrote before the election that if we lived in swing states (which I did), we should vote for Obama but “without illusions”. Whatever you think of Chomsky’s politics, I think that’s generically good advice. You have to be clear minded and realistic about the person you are voting for. You shouldn’t buy the marketing hype. You shouldn’t accept that someone is going to do the things he says he’s going to do just because he said it.  You should never have any illusions.

  We have an impoverished left wing movement right now. We are, many of us in this movement far too young and idealistic and trusting. We voted for Obama and no matter how hard we tried to keep our hearts out of the vote and make it all about our heads many of us… most of us even I’d say had so very very many illusions. We bought the hype. Some of us a little bit. Others of us a LOT. You can see it in all the excuses and all the exceptions and all the many many many ways people tried to justify or explain or even just understand decision after decision Obama made that didn’t fit in even the slightest bit with our hopes and dreams. We had illusions. 

  Just as the Conservatives were CONSISTENT in their message that Obama was in fact NOT one of US, the liberals of the Left has been consistent in their overwhelming desire to portray the opposite message. We would do anything, say anything to make sure Obama WAS in fact one of US.  But he wasn’t.  He never was. He’s a Third Way Centrist Democrat. And that’s something different.

   

  • 6:33 pm
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