While Democracy and the Democratic Party may sound similar, the party leaders again showed yesterday that one has little to do with the other. President Obama and party leaders wanted the party’s platform changed to include a reference to both Jerusalem being the capital of Israel and God. The omissions however were not accidental and a high number of delegates opposed the change, which had to be agreed to by two-thirds of the delegates. As shown in the video below, in calling for a voice vote, the leadership was shocked when it appeared that more people voted no than yes — certainly well short of two-thirds in support of the changes. That did not matter. The leadership just declared the vote as having passed by two-thirds acclamation.
Many wanted to be neutral on the divisive issue of Jerusalem but Obama was worried about the political backlash among Jewish voters. Many others wanted a secular platform and to stand apart from faith-based politics. Obama himself has relied on faith-based politics and policies, as discussed in earlier columns. Obama objected to the removal of the word God and seemed to miss the secular purpose of the move, asking him “Why on earth would that have been taken out?” It appears that no one had the courage to answer that question by explaining to Obama that it is not necessarily that delegates do not believe in God but were standing against the use of God for political advantage. Instead, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz insisted that “the platform is being amended to maintain consistency with the personal views expressed by the President and in the Democratic Party platform in 2008.”
The problem is that the platform actually reflects the views of the party members and they did not agree. The GOP had already pounced on the omissions in the platform and the Democratic leadership wanted the issues removed regardless of the opposition of the membership. Waserman Schultz dismissed the omitted language as a “technical oversight” ignoring the obviously high number of delegates supporting the omission. When combined with the rejection of the clear vote, the statement left the convention looking like a Chinese Party Congress. The “technical oversight” in this case proved to be the views of the delegates who were told that they would decide the content of the platform to reflect the views of the party base rather than the party bosses.
In fairness to the Democratic Party, the GOP has relied more heavily on faith-based politics in the past as shown most vividly by George Bush in his first successful run for the White House. The GOP also did not show much commitment to participatory politics in their treatment of Ron Paul supporters. However, many of us have criticized the use of faith in politics as not only demeaning faith but often also injecting sectarian divisions into our political system. It also undermines principles of separation of church and state when politicians run on their intent to advance religious values in government. Yet, it is how the leadership forced through the changes that was the most unnerving for those who watched yesterday.
Party leaders dispatched former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland to push through the changes. Strickland started out by noting his credential as an “ordained United Methodist minister.” Strickland announced “I am here to attest and affirm that our faith and belief in God is central to the American story and informs the values we’ve expressed in our party’s platform. In addition, President Obama recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and our party’s platform should as well. The 2008 platform read, “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel. The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths.”
It took three voice votes and the opposition was clearly loader than the support for the changes. Yet, Strickland simply declared the measure passed despite all appearances to the contrary.
For those long unhappy with the Democratic leadership, it was a telling symbolic moment. Once again, it appeared that Democratic voters (even delegates representing the most loyal activists) are given only the appearance of participation in their party. For years, Democratic leaders lied to their members about their knowledge and even support for Bush’s torture program and surveillance policies until it was revealed that key Democrats were briefed on the programs. The party leadership then worked with Bush to scuttle any effort to investigate torture and other alleged crimes to avoid implicating key Democratic members. Likewise, while the majority of Democratic voters opposed the continuation of the wars, the Democratic party leaders blocked efforts to force a pull out under both Obama and Bush. These controversies were seen by many that the Democratic Party is primarily run to ensure the continuation of a small number of leaders in power with voters treated as ignorant minions. It was a particularly poignant moment in an uncontested convention after Democratic voters were not given any alternative to Obama.
The image of the chair just ignoring the obvious opposition from the floor of the conventional symbolized this long simmering tension. For full disclosure, I have long been a critic of both parties and have argued for changes to break the monopoly on power by the two parties. It is really not the merits of these two changes that is most bothersome. Arguments can be made on both side of such issues. It is the disregard of the views of the members and the dishonesty in how the matter was handled. The illusion of democracy was all that the leaders wanted in the vote.
Notably, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa seemed to be ready to acknowledge that the delegates clearly rejected the change on the first vote. He then insisted on a second vote and it got worse. He seemed about to admit the failure of the motion and then called for a third vote which sounded even more lopsided (with not just a failure to get two-thirds but even a majority). Yet, he declared the motion passed to the boos and jeers of the delegates.
In creating the illusion of democratic voting, the delegates might have just as well bleated like sheep in protest. It did not matter. The message was clear that the delegates are just a backdrop to be used by party leaders to celebrate their reign.
Source: CNN
I tried working with the League of Women voters who used to do a good job with the debates until the D/R corporation took over, but found them wedded to the idea of only two parties. I tried to work in a polling place, but you have to be D or an R. I observed in the BoE office enough to know that the reason they won’t let independents in is b/c they can’t control us. They want only party people that they control. They appear to be at odds, but there are many anti-people things that they do together that would be exposed if an independent got to see it all. I saw enough to know that there’s more.
BettyKath,
Again thanks for bringing up a very concrete, ubiquitous and lethal threat to “we the people”.
Your approval warms.
“The requirements to get on the ballot for independents are onerous in most states. And you know who makes those rules.” BettyKath—
It wasn’t the Founding Fathers. In all likelihood it was the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. But then came other parties, like the Whigs, and the Republicans,etc.
Paries which perhaps were meant to break up the duopoly.
Raff,
Hayden’s article was one I wished I had the wisdom to write myself. I normally don’t put whole articles in comments, but for this one I hoped that people would at least read and respond to it.
Arthur,
A shame you can’t see your words and how they condemn you and the American system.
Our holy FFs said all men are created equal. They did not say that those who work for a party shall be given the reins to rule us.
That is how politics work, you say. And dilettants like me have no place trying to help someone who tosses his hat in the ring. Would you also say that I may not vote for whom I wish?
I do not say that politics does not work as you claim.
It does indeed. But I prefer the idea that all men are equal, UNTIL they prove themselves BETTER. Then we can choose them to represent us.
With your politics we get no choice at all. Only duopolitics. And machine politics within each party.
Up to 80 percent of the voters reject your idea.
But as long as you have yours, that’s OK with you and your buddies, and your approved position. Time servers and political workers should control the choice options of the citizenry.
Same system as in the USSR, North Korea, and China.
Amazing you can not see that.
The long quote clains it is the movements that cause change. Not the politicians. That seems self-evident.
But not if you and your politicians can stop us. Right?
707,
Actually, I came to thank you for the history but got sidetracked by Arthur.
You are absolutely right. The idea that multi-candidate elections are the anathema of the established parties is right on. In the case I mentioned, they threw their weight behind the idea that there wouldn’t even be an election to choose a candidate. No primary, no contest.
And for the final event, whether for president or any other office, candidates who are not a D or an R need not apply. The requirements to get on the ballot for independents are onerous in most states. And you know who makes those rules.
Arthur,
Feel better now? Maybe a bit of chamomile tea?
It’s exactly attitudes like yours that keep me from joining the Dem or the Reps. A bunch of guys who think they are privileged and entitled, totally ignorant of those they step on.
randyjet,
Got my breath back. Let’s try again.
“So not only do you say you are NOT a member of the Democratic party, but now you think that YOU can simply waltz in and say who the party’s candidate should be.”
——-
I’m not a member of the democratic party but I’m an active citizen in my political district. As such, I have the right to support whatever candidate I think is best for my district regardless of party.
=================
“It should be YOUR candidate without even having lifted so much as a finger to support the party or served as an election judge or other grassroots position.
————
I actually have many years of political activism and activities. And even without this experience, as a citizen I have the right, even responsibility, to actively support (or not) candidates of whatever party.
=================
I am outraged at this kind of thing!”
———-
You are easily outraged.
================
“It obviously never occurred to you that the other person who the DC folks wanted ALSO has supporters in the district who actually DO the shit work of politics. ”
———-
So let those people help get him on the ballot, do the door knocking and phone banking and flyer distribution etc. etc. etc. for their own candidate. Then on election day we all make sure our candidates’ supporters get to the polls.
=======================
“Once again, you think that the DC folks prevented your guy from running. You forget that you agreed that this was NOT the case. Once again, he could have run in the primary, and it would be the DEMOCRATIC VOTERS in that district who decide, NOT the DC folks. It is amazing that simple truth evades you, and that you think your wishes should be granted no matter what. If they are not, then it is corrupt politics, not your lack of work or thinking.”
————-
I accept losing elections. It’s a necessary part of the process. Someone wins, not everyone. I do consider the influence of out of district power players bringing their full weight to discourage candidates from running against their pick to be corrupt politics.
I’ve chosen not to be a member of a party because I want to support the candidate that I consider to be the best for the job, regardless of party or lack of party. It’s an uphill battle, even harder when I have to deal with party hacks who can’t see that they’re supporting suppressive politics.
Mike S.
that was a long article from Hayden, but a great one.
RandyJet,
Your vision of politics is astoundingly like that of Josef Stalin.
You write:
“It should be YOUR candidate without even having lifted so much as a finger to support the party or served as an election judge or other grassroots position. I am outraged at this kind of thing!”
Josef Stalin also thought it should be his candidate that he chose from Moscow, or his local standins, who would be chosen There was no opposition to him or his stooges.
None living anyway.
So what is the difference from Stalin’s USSR to your ideas that the local cadre should, on eventual orders from Washington, choose and finance the “right” candidate?
And that the candidates should be chosen from the local appratatchniks is of course neither true nor realistic.
Should we choose our future from the “hard workere who have been faithful to the party”?
Or should we choose people of principle, morals, and integrity and good ideas which we support?
You would quite simply give us “one candidate” elections.
That suits you, but not me or BettyKath.
Where did the famous phrase and practice of letting anybody throw their hat in the ring and stand up to appeal to the people?
RandyJet supports machine politics. And we have ample proof where thet leads to.
PS Thanks BettyKath for bringing up this important point.
“HOW TO ABANDON DEMOCRACY TO THE POL CLASS”
I have read straw arguments before, but 707 has broken the mold in this field. Not only is he incapable of knowing history, but he cannot understand the difference between Stalin and the US current politics. AS bettykath admitted, it was HER candidate who decided NOT to run. It was NOT because a cop was banging on his door to take him to prison if he ran. THAT is the simple difference you fail to understand.
Where did the famous phrase and practice of letting anybody throw their hat in the ring and stand up to appeal to the people?
Once again, you fail to understand that it was NOT the so called dictators in DC that did not allow that. It was the considered decision of her candidate who for many reasons decided not to run. My guess is that he figured out that hs support in the district was not enough to prevail and that the support of his opponent in that district was TOO MUCH for him to overcome. Sorry, but that is how democracy works. It is the height of arrogance to think that only YOUR candidate is the people choice. WE have ELECTIONS to decide that question, not your opinion.
As for machine politics. ALL government, political parties, and even revolutions are MACHINE politics. There has to be some organization and people making things work in elections, parties, and government. I am astounded that you do not understand that. Candidates just don’t spring up from the ground out of no where. You have to put in your time in working in the parties, politics, and other public endeavors. There is nothing wrong with working in political parties since that is how we decide things. if you chose to not do that, then somebody else will, and it is damn stupid and arrogant of you to think that you can simply waltz in and take over and run things for YOUR benefit and views. Try doing the hard work of politics instead of being a dilletante and spoiled brat.
“Why do they call the RepubliCon states “Red States”? Are they communist?”
In war games the red team is the one which probes for vulnerabilities. In the case of the red team in Virginia it is a different sort of probe.
To create fascist totalitarianism requires but a signature.
To create an informed change in society requires a century…..at least.
To lose heart and leave the field to the Kochs, their money in all districts, and to R&R is to put the pen in their hands.
Will you do that?
randyjet,
Your arrogance is absolutely breathtaking. I’ll need a break to get mine back.
Arthur,
The folks in DC limited the choice of candidates. They would not only not supported him, they would have actively worked against him. People with power who are more interested in retaining their power than allowing “the people” to decide are the biggest danger to our country. I include all those with the money to buy their own reps.
You assume that I’m a Dem. I’m not. Can’t remember if I ever was. I’m an independent who has worked on a number of campaigns in a number of capacities. I know about the dirty tricks and the situational so-called ethics, and the rules that get twisted to support whatever decisions those with the power and money want. I know what it’s like to collect tens of thousands of signatures to get on the ballot while an opponent needs a couple of thousand. I don’t like it and will continue to object to it.
In this case, I’m objecting to out-of-district people deciding for people within the district what their choices will be.
Just to throw something else out there, I also object to out of district money supporting one candidate or another.
In this case, I’m objecting to out-of-district people deciding for people within the district what their choices will be.
Your arrogance is breathtaking. So not only do you say you are NOT a member of the Democratic party, but now you think that YOU can simply waltz in and say who the party’s candidate should be. It should be YOUR candidate without even having lifted so much as a finger to support the party or served as an election judge or other grassroots position. I am outraged at this kind of thing!
It obviously never occurred to you that the other person who the DC folks wanted ALSO has supporters in the district who actually DO the shit work of politics. Once again, you think that the DC folks prevented your guy from running. You forget that you agreed that this was NOT the case. Once again, he could have run in the primary, and it would be the DEMOCRATIC VOTERS in that district who decide, NOT the DC folks. It is amazing that simple truth evades you, and that you think your wishes should be granted no matter what. If they are not, then it is corrupt politics, not your lack of work or thinking.
Lottakatz and Blouise,
Thank you both for sharing your stories. I envy your insights based on real-life encounters and experience.
So the leading candidate gets to “take out” a delegate and substitute a puppet. Democracy in action.
This was quoted today from Truthout as Tom Hayden expresses exactly where I’m coming from. Sorry about the length, but I wasn’t sure if people would follow the link:
The threat of a Romney-Ryan regime should be enough to convince a narrow American majority to vote for Barack Obama, including the disappointed rank-and-file of social movements. A widening of economic and racial inequality. Cuts in Medicare and Medicad. More global warming and extreme weather. Strangling of reproductive rights. Unaffordable tuition. The Neo-cons back in the saddle. Two or three more right-wing Supreme Court appointments to come. Romney as Trojan horse for Ryan the stalking horse and future presidential candidate.
The consolidation of right-wing power would put progressives on the defensive, shrinking any organizing space for pressuring for greater innovations in an Obama second term. Where, for example, would progressives be without the Voting Rights Act programs such as Planned Parenthood, or officials like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis or EPA administrator Lisa Jackson?
But the positive case for More Obama and Better Obama should be made as well. History will show that the first term was better than most progressives now think. A second-term voter mandate against wasteful wars, Wall Street extravagance, and austerity for the many, led by elected officials including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee, Raul Grijalva, Jim McGovern and Keith Ellison, would be, in the language of the Pentagon, a target-rich field of opportunities.
Why Obama’s achievements are dismissed or denied by many on the white liberal-left is a question worth serious consideration. It may only be a matter of legitimate disappointment after the utopian expectations of 2008. It could be pure antipathy to electoral politics, or a superficial assessment of how near impossible it is to change intransigent institutions. It could be a vested organizational interest in asserting there is no difference between the two major parties, a view wildly at odds with the intense partisan conflicts on exhibit every day. Or it could even be a white blindness in perceptions of reality on the left. When African American voters favor Obama 94 percent to zero, and the attacks are coming from the white liberal-left, something needs repair in the foundations of American radicalism.
I intend to explore these questions further during the election season. The point here is that they cumulatively contribute to the common liberal-left perception that Obama is only a man of the compromised center, a president who has delivered nothing worth celebrating. The anger with Obama on the left, combined with broad liberal disappointment with the last three years, results in a dampened enthusiasm at the margins, which could cost him the election.
By their nature, the achievements of social movements are lesser versions of original visions. As the venerable socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas used to lament, when asked if he was proud of Social Security being carried out, “they carried it out in a coffin.” The limits of the 1935 Social Security Act lay in its token payments, limited eligibility, and lack of health insurance – all a result of political compromises thought necessary at the time. Because paying for the program by taxation was much too controversial, Social Security was based on employer and employee contributions. That is what Norman Thomas apparently meant in describing the program as the death of his original vision.
While the forerunners of social progress are disappointed in the results they achieve, it should be of some comfort that the gravediggers have been trying to bury Social Security for 75 years.
As the Port Huron Statement concluded, “If we appear to seek the unattainable, let it be said we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” With dreams like that, it was inevitable that most of us cynically viewed the reforms of the Kennedy and later Johnson administrations as tokenism. Many young radicals of my time – SNCC and SDS – distrusted the Kennedys as too gradual and Martin Luther King Jr. as too accommodating.
But despite all the inherent tensions and faction fights, social movements do achieve significant reforms, which I would define as empowering the powerless, opening up spaces previously closed, and expanding material benefits for those previously denied them. Prominent examples included:
The 1965 Voting Rights Act, which racists and Republicans have attempted to thwart from its passage to the present day;
The enfranchisement of young people who could be drafted but could not vote;
Migrant worker protections achieved by the United Farm Workers;
Medicare and Medicaid (1965);
The US-Soviet nuclear test ban treaty was a response to global pressure for peace (1963);
Creation of the Peace Corps in response to a student campaign;
The birth of opposition to the Cold War (1965 SDS march and teach-ins).
We could neither anticipate nor stop the Vietnam escalation starting in 1965, nor the growth of the National Security State thereafter. The collaboration that existed on domestic issues – cresting in the unity of labor and the civil rights movement in the 1963 March on Washington – did not extend to foreign policy where labor and the Democratic establishment were battling communist-connected insurgencies. But the achievements were not as token as we feared. Under moral and political pressure, Kennedy evolved from early managerialism to become a crucial partner on voter registration, civil rights and the arms race before his 1963 assassination. Were it not for the assassinations of that time, our movements would have been participants in a broad coalition that came to power. A strategy for social change grew from our direct experience, that of outside (often radical) forces taking direct action to awaken and link with establishment insiders to achieve all that was possible, and to lay the foundations for later movements.
After several historical zigs and zags, a similar progressive moment came in the year 2000, when a popular American majority elected Al Gore president only to be thwarted by the US Supreme Court. Gore would have given us a ten-year head start in facing global warming, tested the limits of an environmental presidency and, arguably, kept us out of the multi trillion-dollar Iraq War.
Some on the left still believe that Kennedy was an imperialist who would have been no different than Lyndon Johnson in sending 500,000 Americans to Vietnam, and that Gore was no different than George Bush. Such opinions are wrong on both the facts and conjectures, driven more by ideology or disdain for two-party politics than by the weight of historical evidence.
What these cynical worst-case analyses leave out is the role of strong social movements and progressive constituencies in shaping the political character of the presidency. Just as Abraham Lincoln was influenced by the slaves and Abolitionists, and just as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was shaped by labor and populist movements, so the student, women’s, civil rights and environmental movements carved an essential place for themselves in the future that might have been under John Kennedy and, later, Al Gore.
Barack Obama, like Lincoln, FDR and John Kennedy, has been criticized as too incremental by his base and too radical by his enemies. An irate Thomas Frank concluded that Obama will never pursue a second New Deal because “that is precisely what Obama was here to prevent.” (Harpers, September 2012) In much analysis, Obama’s role seems to be to give austerity and global imperialism an African-American face.
Liberal icons share the disappointment from their perspective, too. Paul Krugman, who supported Hillary Clinton, wrote of the 2009 stimulus package, “Mr. Obama’s victory feels more than a bit like defeat.” (Grunwald, 237) A common complaint from the left and liberals was that Obama was too timid, as if oratory could have achieved the public option in health care.
There is another explanation, as first described in my book, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama. It goes like this: Obama was elected on the wings of social movements going back to slavery time and, concretely, by an extraordinary campaign that challenged the Democratic Party establishment and Iraq orthodoxy in 2008. “Hope” and “change” were code words for Obama’s signal achievement, becoming the first African-American president. In doing so, he opened the door to the presidency to Latinos, women, Jews, gays and lesbians, and others long assumed to be “unqualified.” In victory, however, Obama inevitably fueled emotions ranging from anxiety to hatred among the legions that became the Tea Party counter-movement. Vast numbers of Hillary Clinton Democrats accepted the Obama victory with mixed emotions, while most of the new president’s constituency relaxed their energy after two years of grueling campaigning.
This was not the Civil War when slaves and Abolitionists pushed the president towards Appomattox. Not the New Deal with 40 percent unemployment, thousands of workers occupying auto and steel plants, and a rising Left resisting the threat of fascism at home and abroad. Nor was it the Kennedy era when 200,000 marched for jobs and justice under the leadership of civil rights, labor and clergy organizations. Not even close.
In fact, polls as early as 2009 showed that government was as much the enemy as banks and corporations. By a huge margin of 63-28, Americans preferred austerity to stimulus and that cutting taxes was better than government programs. (Grunwald, 186) In 2010, a 52-19 majority believed erroneously that Obama had raised middle-class taxes. (Grunwald, 393) Surveys by Democratic consultants indicated the same thing: voters pinched in an economic recession were reluctant to part with their tax dollars for a bureaucracy they did not trust. There was a racial dimension that few pundits mentioned: white voters in places like western Wisconsin, the land of Paul Ryan, were less than enthused about sending their tax dollars to black Milwaukee.
The surprising truth, according to Michael Grunwald’s book, The New New Deal, is that the stimulus program – the American Recovery Act – worked beyond anyone’s expectations. Which is true? Krugman’s repeated story that the stimulus was inadequate? Frank’s claim that Obama’s role was to prevent more radical change? Grunwald’s conclusion that it was both an historic achievement and all that Obama could achieve? Grunwald’s well-documented account, based on two years of writing, holds up – and should be read by any doubters.
At the beginning of the Obama administration, the American economy was losing a net 700,000 jobs per month. In the first month alone of Obama’s presidency, 818,000 jobs vanished. “The shocks of 2008 were nastier than the crash of 1929,” Grunwald asserts, citing the eight trillion dollars in housing wealth that vanished overnight. (Grunwald, 427) That terrifying situation only began to improve when stimulus dollars began to flow. The Recovery Act funded direct employment for people in 100,000 projects including:
“roads, bridges, subways, water pipes, sewer plants, bus stations, fire stations…federal buildings, Grand Canyon National Park, trails, libraries courthouses…hospitals, Ellis Island, seaports, airports, dams, locks, levees, Indian reservations, fish hatcheries, coral reefs, passport offices, military bases, veterans cemeteries, historically-black colleges, particle accelerators, and much more.” (Grunwald, 13)
The green stimulus package transformed the Energy Department into the “world’s largest green energy investment fund.” (Grunwald, 17) The US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy grew from $1.2 billon to $16.4 billion in two years. Ninety billion in stimulus funds were invested in green energy programs, which leveraged another $100 billion in private funds. An advanced battery industry was built from scratch, and 680,000 low-income homes have been weatherized, 120,000 buildings retrofitted for energy efficiency, ten million smart meters have been installed, and 400,000 LED streetlights and traffic signals. (Grunwald, 425, 439) Renewable electricity doubled in three years, as promised. Wind, solar and geothermal projects approved on federal lands grew from zero to 29. (Grunwald, 435) Solar installations went from 280 megawatts in 2008 to 1,855 in 2011. Just five years earlier, the Clinton administration barely pushed through a five-year $6.3 billion clean energy initiative, just three percent of Obama’s $200 billion. Two Obama administration mandates on fuel efficiency, one in 2009 and another last week, will increase the standard from 29 mpg to 54.5 mpg by 2025.
In addition to providing unemployment benefits to millions of Americans, the Recovery Act,
“pushed 39 states to rewrite their eligibility rules in order to qualify for stimulus bonuses, dragging the New Deal-era unemployment system into the computer age (and) permanently extending the counter-cyclical safety net to part-time workers and domestic abuse victims.” (Grunwald, 435)
Grunwald sums up as follows: the Obama Recovery Act, in constant dollars, was the biggest and most transformative energy bill US history, the biggest and most transformative education bill since the Great Society, a big and transformative health care bill, too, the biggest foray into industrial policy (the auto bailout) since FDR, the biggest expansion of anti-poverty programs since LBJ, the biggest middle class tax cut since Ronald Reagan, the biggest infusion of research money ever, and it extended high-speed Internet to under-served communities, a twist on the New Deal rural electrification program. And it contained virtually no earmarks.
And, Grunwald adds, the stimulus became a huge liability in the face of nine percent unemployment, the rise of the Tea Party, and a Republican Party strategy to punish any Republicans who cooperated with Obama. The Republican obstructionism was unprecedented: whereas the Gingich-era Republicans sought to stop the Congress during the Clinton era, the new Republicans had no qualms in trying to stop the president from acting at all during the worst economic and credit crisis in 70 years.
Democrats flinched. They stopped talking about the stimulus. They even let Jay Leno get away with joking that it was communism, “or, as we call it in this country, a stimulus package.” A CBS-New York Times poll in February 2010 revealed that only six percent of Americans believed the stimulus had created any jobs. More Americans thought Elvis was alive.
The Affordable Care Act
Perhaps more than any other policy, Obamacare fed the disillusionment of the liberal-left with the new administration. They agonized in watching Obama retreat over months from his preferred single-payer position to a public option and finally to the only option which could pass the Congress, a huge subsidy to private insurers that resembled the bailout of banks. Liberals blamed Obama for his retreat more than the dinosaur Democrats and obstructionist Republicans who insisted on the final outcome. Thus, Obama received no liberal credit for being the first president to sign the biggest expansion of coverage since 1965.
Obamacare adds 32 million more people to the rolls, including those with pre-existing conditions, women seeking birth control options, and young people up to the age of 26. The provisions of Medicaid in the Obama budget will support elderly and disabled people, and children, as well as middle-class people needing future nursing home care. These Medicaid expansions will be slashed under the Romney-Ryan administration, in addition to Medicare being degraded into a voucher program.
Like the stimulus package, however, Obamacare fueled the Tea Party’s massive protests against the bogeyman of “big government,” even producing hallucinatory right-wing calls to save “our Social Security” from the State. Timid Democrats retreated from their legislative product again, at least for one year. The media headlined polls showing that Obamacare was wildly unpopular (though a closer reading would show that a slight majority either supported the legislation or didn’t think it went far enough.)
Was this an optical problem? Did the passage of Obamacare appear to be a step backwards when viewed against the original single-payer proposal? Or did the liberal-left actually think the spectrum of American politics ranged from themselves to Obama, leaving out the inconvenient truth that hordes of right-wingers were both numerous and highly-organized. It had taken 75 years to add health insurance to FDR’s original Social Security concept, but the politics had changed scarcely at all.
Iraq and Afghanistan
Obama was the first presidential candidate to succeed on a platform of pulling US troops out of an ongoing war (unless you count Richard Nixon’s secret plan for peace in 1969 and “peace is at hand” promise of 1972). By any rational standard, Obama fulfilled that pledge when the last American troops departed Iraq last year.
Many in the peace movement did not believe it then and dismiss it now. To the extent this is a rational objection – and not blindness – it rests on two arguments. First, some claim that Obama was only following the withdrawal plan already agreed to by George Bush. It is an interesting question for future historians to uncover what shadow entity orchestrated the Iraq-US pact between the end of Bush and the coming of Obama. That aside, it is logical to conclude that the immanence of Obama’s victory pushed the Bush administration to wrap up the best withdrawal agreement possible before the unpredictable newcomer took office. In addition, Obama increased his previous withdrawal commitment in February 2009 to include virtually all American forces instead of leaving behind a “residual” force of 20-30,000. It is true that as the endgame neared, Obama left open the possibility of a residual force after American ground troops departed, saying he would be responsive to the request of the Baghdad regime. Here, some on the left seized on these remarks to later claim that Obama had to be forced by the Iraqis to finally leave. There is no evidence for this claim, however. It is equally possible – and I believe more credible – that Obama was simply being Obama, knowing that the Iraqis could not possibly request the Americans to stay.
Dissecting diplomacy, like legislation, is like making sausage, in the old saying. Obama certainly knew that he would gain political cover if he could say with credibility that he was only following Bush’s withdrawal plan and Iraq’s request.
A more bizarre left criticism of Obama on Iraq is that the war itself never ended but instead morphed into a secret war with tens of thousands of Americans fighting as Special Ops or private contractors. Why it would be more effective to continue a losing war with fewer troops has never been asked. After all the talk of tens or hundreds of thousands of US personnel being left behind, the most recent numbers are these: in June of this year there were 1,235 US government civilian employees in Baghdad (down 10% since last quarter) along with 12,477 employees of U.S.-funded contractors and grantees (not all Americans; down 26% since last quarter). (Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, “Quarterly Report and Semiannual Report to the United States Congress.” July 30, 2012) The personnel are for intelligence, embassy security and customary logistical support; not an extraordinary number in a country seething with anti-Americanism. South Korea allows up to 28,500 US military personnel, and Japan some 34,000, not including thousands more dependents and civilian employees – that is what a post-war occupation looks like. (Chanlett-Avery, Emma and Ian E. Rinehart, “The U.S. Military Presence in Okinawa and the Futenma Base Controversy.” Congressional Research Service. August 3, 2012)
Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Long War
Like many who campaigned for Obama in 2008, I opposed the continuing US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the military doctrine of the “Long War” against Islamic fundamentalism. Obama has proven true to his word, the critics have been proven right in our warnings.
According to Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, Obama granted his generals an increase of 33,000 troops for an Afghan surge, but drew the line there and insisted that those troops would start coming home in 2011, a pledge he has kept. The 33,000 figure was disappointing to those of us, including Rep. Barbara Lee, who demanded that at least 50,000 be pulled out by the end of this year. Instead, Obama has promised the pullout of US ground troops and an “Afghan lead” by 2014. In doing so, Obama has triggered a dynamic towards the exits favored by overwhelming numbers of Americans and NATO citizens (Mitt Romney has opposed deadlines while at the same time accepting the 2014 framework).
While it will take years to know the truth, I believe there is a strategic and political reason for Obama’s 2014 timetable. He knows that Afghanistan is a lost cause, though this cannot be acknowledged and dealt with during the election season. Between 2013 and 2014, Obama will have a narrow window to replace Hamid Karzai with a power-sharing arrangement, and make enough deals with the Taliban, the Haqqanis, Pakistan, China and yes, Iran – to salvage and perhaps partition Afghanistan. At present, the neo-cons running Romney’s foreign policy team will not permit any diplomatic contacts with the insurgency even if it means leaving an American soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bigdahl, in Taliban captivity. An ultimate political agreement to try stabilizing Afghanistan will require diplomacy with several countries at the top of the neo-cons enemies’ list. Even then, implosion and defeat are Afghan possibilities which Obama dares not mention.
Others in the peace movement, along with civil libertarians, rage against Obama because of his secret escalating drone attacks. They are right morally to keep making righteous noise, especially about the official cover-up of casualty rates. But it will take a political-diplomatic strategy of ending the Afghan war in order to stop the drones. Civil liberties and human rights groups who are vociferous against the drones still refuse to oppose the Afghan war itself, which is the primary cause of the drone killings. Such groups also oppose the assassinations of Al Qaeda leaders and the prosecution of whistleblowers without opposing the underlying wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
In summary, Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq has been clouded in left disbelief and overshadowed by criticism of his policies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond. On the merits, these criticisms are entirely justified. When they lead to opposing Obama’s re-election, they help Romney and the return of the neo-cons.
Where to Go from Here
The white liberal-left, however modest in numbers, is hugely important in a close presidential election, where the margin of difference may be one percent or less in states with large progressive constituencies. If Obama loses, it will be unfair to blame the left, but they will be blamed nonetheless. As a consequence they will become more marginal, far less able to connect with the progressive constituencies and mass movements with vital stakes in Obama’s re-election.
The potential toll can be glimpsed already in the current decline of the radical left amidst the greatest economic meltdown in seven decades. Of course radical movements will rise again, but more likely from the activist networks who tried to stop Romney and re-elect Obama, not from those who sat on their hands and believed it was all another circus.
There is plenty of time to still make a difference. First, some people on the left will have to become used to the idea that partial power only brings partial results. While we can establish enclaves for dreamers from Mendocino to Brooklyn, from Madison to Austin, we have to win support from the center in battleground states or risk losing decades.
The second lesson is for self-defined radicals to be immersed in the everyday problems of the mass constituencies that depend on presidents to make a small margin of difference in their lives.
One small example of how it works: there would be no federal consent decrees over brutal police departments were in not for Al Sharpton hammering at Bill Clinton to include lawsuits for unconstitutional “patterns and practices” in his otherwise draconian Omnibus Crime legislation in 1994.
Third, election seasons are perfect organizing moments when large numbers of people are open to persuasion on public issues. It may be springtime before the next cycle of activism comes around again. Now is the time to build local lists and structures for voter turnout in November and street turnouts thereafter.
This particular election offers the perfect moment to build opposition to Citizens United and “corporate personhood,” for renewed movements for a constitutional right to vote, the deeper regulation of Wall Street, and a constitutional right to vote for campaigns down the road. Does anyone seriously believe that the Dreamers and marriage-equality movements will accept a return to second-class status without the fight of their lifetimes?
It can be time to begin a realignment of the electoral left as well. The active Green Party networks need to shed their reputation as “spoilers” just as the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) needs to shed its appearance of only “tailing” the Democrats. Labor insurgents like National Nurses United, and even the formidable SEIU, are demanding a more independent role in coalition politics. One can almost feel a new politics trying to be born in the so-called womb of the old, a third “party of the people” both inside and outside the two-party system. What if the Green Party decided to invest in places of the richest electoral opportunity instead of campaigning vigorously where the stakes are 50-50? Why not a negotiated merger of the Greens and PDA in the close races, and PDA support for Green candidates where they are most viable? It is entirely possible to visualize creative leaps out of electoral traps while strengthening an independent left within the institutions of state power. Protestors in the streets should serve as a permanently challenging – and threatening – disruptive presence in constant orchestrated interaction with forces on the inside, too, not simply serve as occasional “street heat” to be enlisted when pressure is needed by the insiders.
Now through November, the radical left can be the effective One Percent. The 99 Percent will be appreciative.
For a thoughtful left perspective, please see also Bill Fletcher and Carl Davidson’s August 9, 2012 essay.
Update: My “Saving Obama, Saving Ourselves” commentary is being circulated widely in the blogosphere, which I am thankful for. Let me share my responses to some of the many comments I have received in their various incarnations.
Pathological
“Your fraud-man Obama is the ultimate slick suave lick-spittle corporate tool not just content to keeping the MIC/Pentagon well oiled and lubricated whilst greasing his greedy grubby outstretched palms throughout the obscene duration of his four year tenure.”
Get a grip and let’s be in touch. If you include your email address next time, then I’ll gladly write.
Radical disappointment
“Hayden now says our expectations were unreasonably high for Obama. But I and a friend heard Hayden speak a couple weeks (at Metro State in St. Paul) before Obama’s 2008 election and were surprised, even then, at how absolutely enthralled he was. He could not gush enough.”
Yes, I was emotionally moved to see Obama win the primaries and the presidency, achieving something I never imagined possible when I lived in Georgia during the civil rights movement. But I also founded a network in 2008 called “Progressives for Obama,” which stipulated that we would continue opposing him on Afghanistan, NAFTA and other issues, while strongly supporting his election as a victory for his progressive and multi-racial constituency.
I have an African-American child and it moves me deeply that he is growing up in Obama’s world. I strongly identify with the women, the LGBT community, and the student Dreamers who have so much at stake in this election. So much. The left should be on their side.
At the same time, every day since 2003, I have written and spoken out against the Long War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan-Pakistan War, the Yemen War, and their terrible domestic consequences in terms of budgets and civil liberties. Until we end those wars, and the Drug War as well, it will be next to impossible to protect civil liberties from constant erosion. There is no reason to think our cause would be advanced under a Romney presidency.
Substantive Dialogue
“I think Mr. Hayden racializes the question too much in order to discount why radical progressives view the Democrats and Republicans as a two-party tyranny even though there are obviously great differences between the two wings as to how the tyranny of the corporate feudalism is to be enforced. Hayden sets up a straw man fallacy that the argument against the two-party dictatorship is based on the notion that “there is no difference between the two major parties.” That is not an argument anyone is making, except in the most rhetorical fashion of saying when it comes to the issue of the power of wealth controlling the nation the differences are negligible.”
Good points all, including the rest of the comment and those similar.
I know the “straw-man” argument seems made up, but Ralph Nader in 1990 and the Green Party this year argue that there is no difference between the parties, that they are a “duopoly” of one ruling system. The apparent difference between the parties, in this view, is only a difference in ruling methods. So there is no way the rank-and-file can ever take over the Democratic Party.
On the latter point, based on my experience, I think the critic is right. But I am not sure I have ever believed or written that the rank-and-file can “take over” the Democratic Party. The critic holds to a top-down analysis of the two parties as different “wings” of the lords who rule; the Democrats try to buy off the middle class in order to serve the same corporate interests. Maybe, but middle class achievements like Social Security were won by mass movements who secured valuable concessions from those “lords” in the 1930s, and there is more than a small difference between Social Security and No Social Security.
My point is that the critic entirely ignores the role of rank-and-file social movements in forcing important improvements in everyday life from the political class. These should not be dismissed simply as ways to keep the rulers in power – if that was so, why were those rulers so madly opposed for so long to women’s rights, civil rights, labor rights – as some of them still are? Social movements influence the climate of civil society, which influences voter beliefs, which forces some politicians to sometimes make concessions that matter to us all.
We can threaten the stable rule of the power elite with popular movements. We can ally on issues with the one hundred or so progressive Democrats in Congress or statehouses across the country. We can continue strengthening immigrant rights, women’s rights, labor rights, and limiting the freedom-to-maneuver of the war makers and Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street was a starting point. The great fight ahead is likely to be against the power of great wealth over our political freedoms. It is good for our organizing that Obama stood up to the Supreme Court justices in front of the country, and good that he favors a constitutional amendment to roll back Citizens United. That provides a favorable climate for organizing – but we have to make it happen.
As for “racializing the issue,” I do not understand all the causes but facts are facts. White radicals are the leading critics of Obama. Polls have shown African American voters favoring him 94 percent to zero, Latinos around 70 percent, along with a majority of women. Okay, Cornell West, Tavis Smiley and Glen Ford, all black, attack Obama. I do not know their intended vote. But including their dissent, black opposition still rounds off to Zero.
The threat of a Romney-Ryan regime should be enough to convince a narrow American majority to vote for Barack Obama, including the disappointed rank-and-file of social movements. A widening of economic and racial inequality. Cuts in Medicare and Medicad. More global warming and extreme weather. Strangling of reproductive rights. Unaffordable tuition. The Neo-cons back in the saddle. Two or three more right-wing Supreme Court appointments to come. Romney as Trojan horse for Ryan the stalking horse and future presidential candidate.
The consolidation of right-wing power would put progressives on the defensive, shrinking any organizing space for pressuring for greater innovations in an Obama second term. Where, for example, would progressives be without the Voting Rights Act programs such as Planned Parenthood, or officials like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis or EPA administrator Lisa Jackson?
But the positive case for More Obama and Better Obama should be made as well. History will show that the first term was better than most progressives now think. A second-term voter mandate against wasteful wars, Wall Street extravagance, and austerity for the many, led by elected officials including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee, Raul Grijalva, Jim McGovern and Keith Ellison, would be, in the language of the Pentagon, a target-rich field of opportunities.
Why Obama’s achievements are dismissed or denied by many on the white liberal-left is a question worth serious consideration. It may only be a matter of legitimate disappointment after the utopian expectations of 2008. It could be pure antipathy to electoral politics, or a superficial assessment of how near impossible it is to change intransigent institutions. It could be a vested organizational interest in asserting there is no difference between the two major parties, a view wildly at odds with the intense partisan conflicts on exhibit every day. Or it could even be a white blindness in perceptions of reality on the left. When African American voters favor Obama 94 percent to zero, and the attacks are coming from the white liberal-left, something needs repair in the foundations of American radicalism.
I intend to explore these questions further during the election season. The point here is that they cumulatively contribute to the common liberal-left perception that Obama is only a man of the compromised center, a president who has delivered nothing worth celebrating. The anger with Obama on the left, combined with broad liberal disappointment with the last three years, results in a dampened enthusiasm at the margins, which could cost him the election.
By their nature, the achievements of social movements are lesser versions of original visions. As the venerable socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas used to lament, when asked if he was proud of Social Security being carried out, “they carried it out in a coffin.” The limits of the 1935 Social Security Act lay in its token payments, limited eligibility, and lack of health insurance – all a result of political compromises thought necessary at the time. Because paying for the program by taxation was much too controversial, Social Security was based on employer and employee contributions. That is what Norman Thomas apparently meant in describing the program as the death of his original vision.
While the forerunners of social progress are disappointed in the results they achieve, it should be of some comfort that the gravediggers have been trying to bury Social Security for 75 years.
As the Port Huron Statement concluded, “If we appear to seek the unattainable, let it be said we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” With dreams like that, it was inevitable that most of us cynically viewed the reforms of the Kennedy and later Johnson administrations as tokenism. Many young radicals of my time – SNCC and SDS – distrusted the Kennedys as too gradual and Martin Luther King Jr. as too accommodating.
But despite all the inherent tensions and faction fights, social movements do achieve significant reforms, which I would define as empowering the powerless, opening up spaces previously closed, and expanding material benefits for those previously denied them. Prominent examples included:
The 1965 Voting Rights Act, which racists and Republicans have attempted to thwart from its passage to the present day;
The enfranchisement of young people who could be drafted but could not vote;
Migrant worker protections achieved by the United Farm Workers;
Medicare and Medicaid (1965);
The US-Soviet nuclear test ban treaty was a response to global pressure for peace (1963);
Creation of the Peace Corps in response to a student campaign;
The birth of opposition to the Cold War (1965 SDS march and teach-ins).
We could neither anticipate nor stop the Vietnam escalation starting in 1965, nor the growth of the National Security State thereafter. The collaboration that existed on domestic issues – cresting in the unity of labor and the civil rights movement in the 1963 March on Washington – did not extend to foreign policy where labor and the Democratic establishment were battling communist-connected insurgencies. But the achievements were not as token as we feared. Under moral and political pressure, Kennedy evolved from early managerialism to become a crucial partner on voter registration, civil rights and the arms race before his 1963 assassination. Were it not for the assassinations of that time, our movements would have been participants in a broad coalition that came to power. A strategy for social change grew from our direct experience, that of outside (often radical) forces taking direct action to awaken and link with establishment insiders to achieve all that was possible, and to lay the foundations for later movements.
After several historical zigs and zags, a similar progressive moment came in the year 2000, when a popular American majority elected Al Gore president only to be thwarted by the US Supreme Court. Gore would have given us a ten-year head start in facing global warming, tested the limits of an environmental presidency and, arguably, kept us out of the multi trillion-dollar Iraq War.
Some on the left still believe that Kennedy was an imperialist who would have been no different than Lyndon Johnson in sending 500,000 Americans to Vietnam, and that Gore was no different than George Bush. Such opinions are wrong on both the facts and conjectures, driven more by ideology or disdain for two-party politics than by the weight of historical evidence.
What these cynical worst-case analyses leave out is the role of strong social movements and progressive constituencies in shaping the political character of the presidency. Just as Abraham Lincoln was influenced by the slaves and Abolitionists, and just as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was shaped by labor and populist movements, so the student, women’s, civil rights and environmental movements carved an essential place for themselves in the future that might have been under John Kennedy and, later, Al Gore.
Barack Obama, like Lincoln, FDR and John Kennedy, has been criticized as too incremental by his base and too radical by his enemies. An irate Thomas Frank concluded that Obama will never pursue a second New Deal because “that is precisely what Obama was here to prevent.” (Harpers, September 2012) In much analysis, Obama’s role seems to be to give austerity and global imperialism an African-American face.
Liberal icons share the disappointment from their perspective, too. Paul Krugman, who supported Hillary Clinton, wrote of the 2009 stimulus package, “Mr. Obama’s victory feels more than a bit like defeat.” (Grunwald, 237) A common complaint from the left and liberals was that Obama was too timid, as if oratory could have achieved the public option in health care.
There is another explanation, as first described in my book, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama. It goes like this: Obama was elected on the wings of social movements going back to slavery time and, concretely, by an extraordinary campaign that challenged the Democratic Party establishment and Iraq orthodoxy in 2008. “Hope” and “change” were code words for Obama’s signal achievement, becoming the first African-American president. In doing so, he opened the door to the presidency to Latinos, women, Jews, gays and lesbians, and others long assumed to be “unqualified.” In victory, however, Obama inevitably fueled emotions ranging from anxiety to hatred among the legions that became the Tea Party counter-movement. Vast numbers of Hillary Clinton Democrats accepted the Obama victory with mixed emotions, while most of the new president’s constituency relaxed their energy after two years of grueling campaigning.
This was not the Civil War when slaves and Abolitionists pushed the president towards Appomattox. Not the New Deal with 40 percent unemployment, thousands of workers occupying auto and steel plants, and a rising Left resisting the threat of fascism at home and abroad. Nor was it the Kennedy era when 200,000 marched for jobs and justice under the leadership of civil rights, labor and clergy organizations. Not even close.
In fact, polls as early as 2009 showed that government was as much the enemy as banks and corporations. By a huge margin of 63-28, Americans preferred austerity to stimulus and that cutting taxes was better than government programs. (Grunwald, 186) In 2010, a 52-19 majority believed erroneously that Obama had raised middle-class taxes. (Grunwald, 393) Surveys by Democratic consultants indicated the same thing: voters pinched in an economic recession were reluctant to part with their tax dollars for a bureaucracy they did not trust. There was a racial dimension that few pundits mentioned: white voters in places like western Wisconsin, the land of Paul Ryan, were less than enthused about sending their tax dollars to black Milwaukee.
The surprising truth, according to Michael Grunwald’s book, The New New Deal, is that the stimulus program – the American Recovery Act – worked beyond anyone’s expectations. Which is true? Krugman’s repeated story that the stimulus was inadequate? Frank’s claim that Obama’s role was to prevent more radical change? Grunwald’s conclusion that it was both an historic achievement and all that Obama could achieve? Grunwald’s well-documented account, based on two years of writing, holds up – and should be read by any doubters.
At the beginning of the Obama administration, the American economy was losing a net 700,000 jobs per month. In the first month alone of Obama’s presidency, 818,000 jobs vanished. “The shocks of 2008 were nastier than the crash of 1929,” Grunwald asserts, citing the eight trillion dollars in housing wealth that vanished overnight. (Grunwald, 427) That terrifying situation only began to improve when stimulus dollars began to flow. The Recovery Act funded direct employment for people in 100,000 projects including:
“roads, bridges, subways, water pipes, sewer plants, bus stations, fire stations…federal buildings, Grand Canyon National Park, trails, libraries courthouses…hospitals, Ellis Island, seaports, airports, dams, locks, levees, Indian reservations, fish hatcheries, coral reefs, passport offices, military bases, veterans cemeteries, historically-black colleges, particle accelerators, and much more.” (Grunwald, 13)
The green stimulus package transformed the Energy Department into the “world’s largest green energy investment fund.” (Grunwald, 17) The US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy grew from $1.2 billon to $16.4 billion in two years. Ninety billion in stimulus funds were invested in green energy programs, which leveraged another $100 billion in private funds. An advanced battery industry was built from scratch, and 680,000 low-income homes have been weatherized, 120,000 buildings retrofitted for energy efficiency, ten million smart meters have been installed, and 400,000 LED streetlights and traffic signals. (Grunwald, 425, 439) Renewable electricity doubled in three years, as promised. Wind, solar and geothermal projects approved on federal lands grew from zero to 29. (Grunwald, 435) Solar installations went from 280 megawatts in 2008 to 1,855 in 2011. Just five years earlier, the Clinton administration barely pushed through a five-year $6.3 billion clean energy initiative, just three percent of Obama’s $200 billion. Two Obama administration mandates on fuel efficiency, one in 2009 and another last week, will increase the standard from 29 mpg to 54.5 mpg by 2025.
In addition to providing unemployment benefits to millions of Americans, the Recovery Act,
“pushed 39 states to rewrite their eligibility rules in order to qualify for stimulus bonuses, dragging the New Deal-era unemployment system into the computer age (and) permanently extending the counter-cyclical safety net to part-time workers and domestic abuse victims.” (Grunwald, 435)
Grunwald sums up as follows: the Obama Recovery Act, in constant dollars, was the biggest and most transformative energy bill US history, the biggest and most transformative education bill since the Great Society, a big and transformative health care bill, too, the biggest foray into industrial policy (the auto bailout) since FDR, the biggest expansion of anti-poverty programs since LBJ, the biggest middle class tax cut since Ronald Reagan, the biggest infusion of research money ever, and it extended high-speed Internet to under-served communities, a twist on the New Deal rural electrification program. And it contained virtually no earmarks.
And, Grunwald adds, the stimulus became a huge liability in the face of nine percent unemployment, the rise of the Tea Party, and a Republican Party strategy to punish any Republicans who cooperated with Obama. The Republican obstructionism was unprecedented: whereas the Gingich-era Republicans sought to stop the Congress during the Clinton era, the new Republicans had no qualms in trying to stop the president from acting at all during the worst economic and credit crisis in 70 years.
Democrats flinched. They stopped talking about the stimulus. They even let Jay Leno get away with joking that it was communism, “or, as we call it in this country, a stimulus package.” A CBS-New York Times poll in February 2010 revealed that only six percent of Americans believed the stimulus had created any jobs. More Americans thought Elvis was alive.
The Affordable Care Act
Perhaps more than any other policy, Obamacare fed the disillusionment of the liberal-left with the new administration. They agonized in watching Obama retreat over months from his preferred single-payer position to a public option and finally to the only option which could pass the Congress, a huge subsidy to private insurers that resembled the bailout of banks. Liberals blamed Obama for his retreat more than the dinosaur Democrats and obstructionist Republicans who insisted on the final outcome. Thus, Obama received no liberal credit for being the first president to sign the biggest expansion of coverage since 1965.
Obamacare adds 32 million more people to the rolls, including those with pre-existing conditions, women seeking birth control options, and young people up to the age of 26. The provisions of Medicaid in the Obama budget will support elderly and disabled people, and children, as well as middle-class people needing future nursing home care. These Medicaid expansions will be slashed under the Romney-Ryan administration, in addition to Medicare being degraded into a voucher program.
Like the stimulus package, however, Obamacare fueled the Tea Party’s massive protests against the bogeyman of “big government,” even producing hallucinatory right-wing calls to save “our Social Security” from the State. Timid Democrats retreated from their legislative product again, at least for one year. The media headlined polls showing that Obamacare was wildly unpopular (though a closer reading would show that a slight majority either supported the legislation or didn’t think it went far enough.)
Was this an optical problem? Did the passage of Obamacare appear to be a step backwards when viewed against the original single-payer proposal? Or did the liberal-left actually think the spectrum of American politics ranged from themselves to Obama, leaving out the inconvenient truth that hordes of right-wingers were both numerous and highly-organized. It had taken 75 years to add health insurance to FDR’s original Social Security concept, but the politics had changed scarcely at all.
Iraq and Afghanistan
Obama was the first presidential candidate to succeed on a platform of pulling US troops out of an ongoing war (unless you count Richard Nixon’s secret plan for peace in 1969 and “peace is at hand” promise of 1972). By any rational standard, Obama fulfilled that pledge when the last American troops departed Iraq last year.
Many in the peace movement did not believe it then and dismiss it now. To the extent this is a rational objection – and not blindness – it rests on two arguments. First, some claim that Obama was only following the withdrawal plan already agreed to by George Bush. It is an interesting question for future historians to uncover what shadow entity orchestrated the Iraq-US pact between the end of Bush and the coming of Obama. That aside, it is logical to conclude that the immanence of Obama’s victory pushed the Bush administration to wrap up the best withdrawal agreement possible before the unpredictable newcomer took office. In addition, Obama increased his previous withdrawal commitment in February 2009 to include virtually all American forces instead of leaving behind a “residual” force of 20-30,000. It is true that as the endgame neared, Obama left open the possibility of a residual force after American ground troops departed, saying he would be responsive to the request of the Baghdad regime. Here, some on the left seized on these remarks to later claim that Obama had to be forced by the Iraqis to finally leave. There is no evidence for this claim, however. It is equally possible – and I believe more credible – that Obama was simply being Obama, knowing that the Iraqis could not possibly request the Americans to stay.
Dissecting diplomacy, like legislation, is like making sausage, in the old saying. Obama certainly knew that he would gain political cover if he could say with credibility that he was only following Bush’s withdrawal plan and Iraq’s request.
A more bizarre left criticism of Obama on Iraq is that the war itself never ended but instead morphed into a secret war with tens of thousands of Americans fighting as Special Ops or private contractors. Why it would be more effective to continue a losing war with fewer troops has never been asked. After all the talk of tens or hundreds of thousands of US personnel being left behind, the most recent numbers are these: in June of this year there were 1,235 US government civilian employees in Baghdad (down 10% since last quarter) along with 12,477 employees of U.S.-funded contractors and grantees (not all Americans; down 26% since last quarter). (Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, “Quarterly Report and Semiannual Report to the United States Congress.” July 30, 2012) The personnel are for intelligence, embassy security and customary logistical support; not an extraordinary number in a country seething with anti-Americanism. South Korea allows up to 28,500 US military personnel, and Japan some 34,000, not including thousands more dependents and civilian employees – that is what a post-war occupation looks like. (Chanlett-Avery, Emma and Ian E. Rinehart, “The U.S. Military Presence in Okinawa and the Futenma Base Controversy.” Congressional Research Service. August 3, 2012)
Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Long War
Like many who campaigned for Obama in 2008, I opposed the continuing US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the military doctrine of the “Long War” against Islamic fundamentalism. Obama has proven true to his word, the critics have been proven right in our warnings.
According to Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, Obama granted his generals an increase of 33,000 troops for an Afghan surge, but drew the line there and insisted that those troops would start coming home in 2011, a pledge he has kept. The 33,000 figure was disappointing to those of us, including Rep. Barbara Lee, who demanded that at least 50,000 be pulled out by the end of this year. Instead, Obama has promised the pullout of US ground troops and an “Afghan lead” by 2014. In doing so, Obama has triggered a dynamic towards the exits favored by overwhelming numbers of Americans and NATO citizens (Mitt Romney has opposed deadlines while at the same time accepting the 2014 framework).
While it will take years to know the truth, I believe there is a strategic and political reason for Obama’s 2014 timetable. He knows that Afghanistan is a lost cause, though this cannot be acknowledged and dealt with during the election season. Between 2013 and 2014, Obama will have a narrow window to replace Hamid Karzai with a power-sharing arrangement, and make enough deals with the Taliban, the Haqqanis, Pakistan, China and yes, Iran – to salvage and perhaps partition Afghanistan. At present, the neo-cons running Romney’s foreign policy team will not permit any diplomatic contacts with the insurgency even if it means leaving an American soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bigdahl, in Taliban captivity. An ultimate political agreement to try stabilizing Afghanistan will require diplomacy with several countries at the top of the neo-cons enemies’ list. Even then, implosion and defeat are Afghan possibilities which Obama dares not mention.
Others in the peace movement, along with civil libertarians, rage against Obama because of his secret escalating drone attacks. They are right morally to keep making righteous noise, especially about the official cover-up of casualty rates. But it will take a political-diplomatic strategy of ending the Afghan war in order to stop the drones. Civil liberties and human rights groups who are vociferous against the drones still refuse to oppose the Afghan war itself, which is the primary cause of the drone killings. Such groups also oppose the assassinations of Al Qaeda leaders and the prosecution of whistleblowers without opposing the underlying wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
In summary, Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq has been clouded in left disbelief and overshadowed by criticism of his policies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond. On the merits, these criticisms are entirely justified. When they lead to opposing Obama’s re-election, they help Romney and the return of the neo-cons.
Where to Go from Here
The white liberal-left, however modest in numbers, is hugely important in a close presidential election, where the margin of difference may be one percent or less in states with large progressive constituencies. If Obama loses, it will be unfair to blame the left, but they will be blamed nonetheless. As a consequence they will become more marginal, far less able to connect with the progressive constituencies and mass movements with vital stakes in Obama’s re-election.
The potential toll can be glimpsed already in the current decline of the radical left amidst the greatest economic meltdown in seven decades. Of course radical movements will rise again, but more likely from the activist networks who tried to stop Romney and re-elect Obama, not from those who sat on their hands and believed it was all another circus.
There is plenty of time to still make a difference. First, some people on the left will have to become used to the idea that partial power only brings partial results. While we can establish enclaves for dreamers from Mendocino to Brooklyn, from Madison to Austin, we have to win support from the center in battleground states or risk losing decades.
The second lesson is for self-defined radicals to be immersed in the everyday problems of the mass constituencies that depend on presidents to make a small margin of difference in their lives.
One small example of how it works: there would be no federal consent decrees over brutal police departments were in not for Al Sharpton hammering at Bill Clinton to include lawsuits for unconstitutional “patterns and practices” in his otherwise draconian Omnibus Crime legislation in 1994.
Third, election seasons are perfect organizing moments when large numbers of people are open to persuasion on public issues. It may be springtime before the next cycle of activism comes around again. Now is the time to build local lists and structures for voter turnout in November and street turnouts thereafter.
This particular election offers the perfect moment to build opposition to Citizens United and “corporate personhood,” for renewed movements for a constitutional right to vote, the deeper regulation of Wall Street, and a constitutional right to vote for campaigns down the road. Does anyone seriously believe that the Dreamers and marriage-equality movements will accept a return to second-class status without the fight of their lifetimes?
It can be time to begin a realignment of the electoral left as well. The active Green Party networks need to shed their reputation as “spoilers” just as the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) needs to shed its appearance of only “tailing” the Democrats. Labor insurgents like National Nurses United, and even the formidable SEIU, are demanding a more independent role in coalition politics. One can almost feel a new politics trying to be born in the so-called womb of the old, a third “party of the people” both inside and outside the two-party system. What if the Green Party decided to invest in places of the richest electoral opportunity instead of campaigning vigorously where the stakes are 50-50? Why not a negotiated merger of the Greens and PDA in the close races, and PDA support for Green candidates where they are most viable? It is entirely possible to visualize creative leaps out of electoral traps while strengthening an independent left within the institutions of state power. Protestors in the streets should serve as a permanently challenging – and threatening – disruptive presence in constant orchestrated interaction with forces on the inside, too, not simply serve as occasional “street heat” to be enlisted when pressure is needed by the insiders.
Now through November, the radical left can be the effective One Percent. The 99 Percent will be appreciative.
For a thoughtful left perspective, please see also Bill Fletcher and Carl Davidson’s August 9, 2012 essay.
Update: My “Saving Obama, Saving Ourselves” commentary is being circulated widely in the blogosphere, which I am thankful for. Let me share my responses to some of the many comments I have received in their various incarnations.
Pathological
“Your fraud-man Obama is the ultimate slick suave lick-spittle corporate tool not just content to keeping the MIC/Pentagon well oiled and lubricated whilst greasing his greedy grubby outstretched palms throughout the obscene duration of his four year tenure.”
Get a grip and let’s be in touch. If you include your email address next time, then I’ll gladly write.
Radical disappointment
“Hayden now says our expectations were unreasonably high for Obama. But I and a friend heard Hayden speak a couple weeks (at Metro State in St. Paul) before Obama’s 2008 election and were surprised, even then, at how absolutely enthralled he was. He could not gush enough.”
Yes, I was emotionally moved to see Obama win the primaries and the presidency, achieving something I never imagined possible when I lived in Georgia during the civil rights movement. But I also founded a network in 2008 called “Progressives for Obama,” which stipulated that we would continue opposing him on Afghanistan, NAFTA and other issues, while strongly supporting his election as a victory for his progressive and multi-racial constituency.
I have an African-American child and it moves me deeply that he is growing up in Obama’s world. I strongly identify with the women, the LGBT community, and the student Dreamers who have so much at stake in this election. So much. The left should be on their side.
At the same time, every day since 2003, I have written and spoken out against the Long War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan-Pakistan War, the Yemen War, and their terrible domestic consequences in terms of budgets and civil liberties. Until we end those wars, and the Drug War as well, it will be next to impossible to protect civil liberties from constant erosion. There is no reason to think our cause would be advanced under a Romney presidency.
Substantive Dialogue
“I think Mr. Hayden racializes the question too much in order to discount why radical progressives view the Democrats and Republicans as a two-party tyranny even though there are obviously great differences between the two wings as to how the tyranny of the corporate feudalism is to be enforced. Hayden sets up a straw man fallacy that the argument against the two-party dictatorship is based on the notion that “there is no difference between the two major parties.” That is not an argument anyone is making, except in the most rhetorical fashion of saying when it comes to the issue of the power of wealth controlling the nation the differences are negligible.”
Good points all, including the rest of the comment and those similar.
I know the “straw-man” argument seems made up, but Ralph Nader in 1990 and the Green Party this year argue that there is no difference between the parties, that they are a “duopoly” of one ruling system. The apparent difference between the parties, in this view, is only a difference in ruling methods. So there is no way the rank-and-file can ever take over the Democratic Party.
On the latter point, based on my experience, I think the critic is right. But I am not sure I have ever believed or written that the rank-and-file can “take over” the Democratic Party. The critic holds to a top-down analysis of the two parties as different “wings” of the lords who rule; the Democrats try to buy off the middle class in order to serve the same corporate interests. Maybe, but middle class achievements like Social Security were won by mass movements who secured valuable concessions from those “lords” in the 1930s, and there is more than a small difference between Social Security and No Social Security.
My point is that the critic entirely ignores the role of rank-and-file social movements in forcing important improvements in everyday life from the political class. These should not be dismissed simply as ways to keep the rulers in power – if that was so, why were those rulers so madly opposed for so long to women’s rights, civil rights, labor rights – as some of them still are? Social movements influence the climate of civil society, which influences voter beliefs, which forces some politicians to sometimes make concessions that matter to us all.
We can threaten the stable rule of the power elite with popular movements. We can ally on issues with the one hundred or so progressive Democrats in Congress or statehouses across the country. We can continue strengthening immigrant rights, women’s rights, labor rights, and limiting the freedom-to-maneuver of the war makers and Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street was a starting point. The great fight ahead is likely to be against the power of great wealth over our political freedoms. It is good for our organizing that Obama stood up to the Supreme Court justices in front of the country, and good that he favors a constitutional amendment to roll back Citizens United. That provides a favorable climate for organizing – but we have to make it happen.
As for “racializing the issue,” I do not understand all the causes but facts are facts. White radicals are the leading critics of Obama. Polls have shown African American voters favoring him 94 percent to zero, Latinos around 70 percent, along with a majority of women. Okay, Cornell West, Tavis Smiley
Mike, that was a lot of text to say: Obama’s a disappointment, I’m still voting for him, and white leftists opposing Obama must be coming from a racist place, considering 94 percent of black people support Obama.
I have to ask, what is so important about the extra two percent of black people that supported Obama over Bill Clinton that licensed white progressives to kvetch about Clinton’s failure?
Of course I’m angry at Obama. Of course I think he should be re-elected over Romney. (Though I still wish Krugman had showed up for a primary challenge in a couple of states, just to shift the debate if nothing else). But for those who can afford to be less picayune, I can understand why bombing civilians is worse than stop-and-frisk, that Obama’s done nothing to oppose. I can understand why workplace rights for trans people fall behind respect for international law. I can understand why some progressives want to make it known that a president only retains their support if the constitution breathes in their administration. I disagree that their inaction will have the intended impact, and thus I don’t share their views. If 4 years of Mitt Romney meant 40 years of Eugene McCarthy, I’d bite that bullet too, but that won’t happen… Most importantly, however, I can respect that view without calling them a cissexist or a racist or a classist.
ARE,
ARE:”…. nor the formation of any opposition caucus to the ruling, makes it clear it was NOT a serious issue.”
Was there time to create a caucus? This was a last minute change I believe. But I was not there, so???
Blouise,
Well, your folks were not ordinary either. My mom took me to Adlai Stevenson’s reception at the hotel. I was about ten. She did not have the energy for more. Politics as
your parents did takes energy and time, I believe.
randyjet 1, September 7, 2012 at 11:14 am
Sorry, but you lie. He did NOT have to quit.
———————————
First of all, don’t call me a liar because you choose to misunderstand what I write.
Of course he didn’t have to quit. He chose to because the guys in DC made it very clear that they wouldn’t support him. It was his choice to fight or not. He chose not to.
The bigger question, and the reason I made the post, is why did the guys in DC make it their choice and not the voters in the district. I’m disappointed that “my guy” didn’t fight, but I’m livid that the guys in DC exhibited the autocratic/patriarchal behavior of making the decision for the people in the district.
Soooooo.
The US is not a democracy.
It’s a republic.
This must mean that the Republicans are the good guys and the Democrats are the bad guys. Seems simple to me. I can read.
Although… there’s some hints that the Republicans fall short of being republicans.
The US needs another revolution to bring it back to its roots.
So everybody vote Ron Paul.
This will upset both parties just about equally.
It sounds like the fairest thing to do.
No?
I’m livid that the guys in DC exhibited the autocratic/patriarchal behavior of making the decision for the people in the district.
Once again, you are not accurate at all. The folks in DC did NOT elect the candidate. It was the people in his district. There are many factors in running for office, and support is one of them. Your guy could have run, but he obviously felt that without outside support from DC he could not have a viable campaign, Or it could have been any number of reasons of which we have no idea.
For example, length of party service and history is a factor. I would hardly expect somebody from outside the party to come in one day, declare his candidacy, and then expect the whole party to fall in line behind him. Sorry, but you need to learn something about politics, instead of looking for conspiracies and finding fault with everybody else. You and your friends are NOT the only people in the Democratic Party.
The illusion about Democracy is in Turley’s head.