"Now, I'd like to speak clearly and candidly to the
American people . . ."
We are witnessing one of the fastest betrayals of the Democratic Party base in modern memory, as President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate slither away from a crucial constituency, the labor movement, and from support of labor's key legislative agenda item: passage of a bill, "The Employee Free Choice Act," which would restore a measure of fairness to labor relations.
The actions of Obama's Chief Financial
Adviser Larry Summers and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in permitting
the payment of $165 million in bonuses to AIG executives (Summers, according
to the Wall Street Journal, actually pressed Sen. Chris Dodd,
D-CT, to secretly remove a bar to the payment of such bonuses from the
bailout bill) and the storm of public outrage that has followed public disclosure
of those payments, provides President Obama, whose administration is
stumbling badly on many fronts, to turn things around and avoid political
disaster.
The
morning after last November’s historic election, triumphant chants of
“Yes We Did” drowned out the Obama campaign message of “Yes We Can.”
Now only four months later enthusiasm has waned, and last Friday the
President felt the need to reassure reporters on Air Force One, “I don’t think that people should be fearful about our future.”
Like every good person I know, and a
lot of evil (i.e., regressive) monsters I don't, I've been watching
very eagerly and carefully to see what decisions Barack Obama is going
to make as our new president.
Just when you think you've woken up from a bad dream...
When it comes to offshore injustice and secret prisons, especially our
notorious but little known prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan,
let's hope the Obama years mean never having to complete that sentence.
I see you out
there. I know you're lurking, seething, sending me angry letters,
posting nasty comments in anonymous forums across the Interweb, not
merely enraged that I and millions like me dare to support President
Obama's massive overhaul of the enormously flawed American idea, but
that I also dare to see him as exactly the finest and most intelligent
and, yes, even integrity-filled progressive visionary we could possibly
hope for at a time like this.
Last week was a busy one for Barack Obama. On Monday he held a
bipartisan fiscal summit where he pledged to cut the deficit in half by
the end of his first term. On Tuesday he addressed both houses of
Congress for the first time, promising the nation: "We will recover, we
will rebuild." On Thursday he produced a budget that set out to
redistribute wealth, heal the sick and save the planet. On Friday he
stopped the war. On Saturday he threw down the gauntlet to special
interests and lobbyists. And on the seventh day he rested.
During the Bush presidency, there were few reporters, if there were
any, who were better on issues of civil liberties and executive power
abuses than Charlie Savage, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his work exposing the lawlessness of Bush's signing statements while at The Boston Globe.
For that reason, it will be very difficult even for the hardest-core
Obama supporters to dismiss away the following observations about Obama
as nothing more than the angry harping of excessively impatient,
unfair
