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Obama Finally Gets His Victory For Bipartisanship
You can blame a bad candidate, bad organization, bad timing of a vacation--choose your rationalization. But the reality is that voters in Massachusetts were reacting to the same foul mist coming off Boston Harbor that New Jersey Voters smelled coming off the Hudson and Virginia voters, the Chesapeake.
What they all understood was that the source lay on the shores of the Potomac.
It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year's time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.
All of this was completely predictable. And it was predicted. I wrote about it for the first time here on the sixth day of Obama's presidency, and many of us have written about it in the intervening year.
The President's steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters had sent packing twice in a row in the name of "bipartisanship," and his refusal ever to utter the words "I am a Democrat" and to articulate what that means, are not among his virtues. We have competing ideas in a democracy--and hence competing parties--for a reason. To paper them over and pretend they do not exist, particularly when the ideology of one of the parties has proven so devastating to the lives of everyday Americans, is not a virtue. It is an abdication of responsibility.
What happens if you refuse to lay the blame for the destruction of our economy on anyone--particularly the party, leaders, and ideology that were in power for the last 8 years and were responsible for it? What happens if you fail to "brand" what has happened as the Bush Depression or the Republican Depression or the natural result of the ideology of unregulated greed, the way FDR branded the Great Depression as Hoover's Depression and created a Democratic majority for 50 years and a new vision of what effective government can do? What happens when you fail to offer and continually reinforce a narrative about what has happened, who caused it, and how you're going to fix it that Americans understand, that makes them angry, that makes them hopeful, and that makes them committed to you and your policies during the tough times that will inevitably lie ahead?
The answer was obvious a year ago, and it is even more obvious today: Voters will come to blame you for not having solved a problem you didn't create, and you will allow the other side to create an alternative narrative for what's happened (government spending , deficits, big government, socialism) that will stick. And it will particularly stick if you make no efforts to prevent it from starting or sticking.
Were Massachusetts voters reacting in part to the health care debate turned debacle? Sure. In a misguided effort to avoid the mistakes of 1993, the President decided that leadership on health care wasn't in his job description and encouraged the Democrats to make their sausage in public, after making his own deals with the same people who brought us pre-existing conditions and $150 prescriptions (and that's with insurance). He promised transparency, and he gave the country a huge dose of it. Unfortunately, what was transparent turned people's stomachs.
The White House allowed the health care narrative to be all about process, and the process the American people saw wasn't pretty. It scared seniors, who worried what would happen to their Medicare. It scared workers, who worried about what would happen to the plans their unions had negotiated so hard for in lieu of salaries. It scared middle class Americans with good health insurance plans, who had--and have--no idea whether their plans will be deemed--if not today, in three or four years--Cadillacs, which will first be taxed and then discontinued, leaving them with exactly what Frank Luntz told them it would leave them with: a bureaucrat between them and their doctor. And worst of all, it seemed to most Americans that the reason they were being asked to make such potentially big sacrifices was so that health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and millionaires wouldn't have to. It seemed not only risky but unfair.
So in that sense, the story of health insurance played right into the story that lies behind the looming tsunami that swept away Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and will sweep away so many more Democratic seats if the Democrats draw the wrong conclusions from this election. The White House just couldn't seem to "get" that the American people could see that they were constantly coming down on the side of the same bankers who were foreclosing people's homes and shutting off the credit to small business owners, when they should have been helping the people whose homes were being foreclosed and the small businesses that were trying to stay afloat because of the recklessness of banks that were now starving them. Americans were tired of hearing Obama "exhort" bankers and speculators to play nice as they collected their record bonuses for a heckuva job in 2009. It took him a year to float the idea of making them pay for a fraction of the damage they had done, and at this point, few Americans have any faith that a tax on big banks will ever become law or that the costs won't just be passed on to them in new fees.
The White House has squandered the greatest opportunity to change both the country and the political landscape since Ronald Reagan. It should have started with a non-watered-down stimulus package big enough to stop the bleeding in the job market--and a smack-down of any Republican who dared to utter the word "deficit" after 8 years of reckless, unpaid Republican spending. It should have followed with stringent regulations on Wall Street and protection of homeowners and small businesses instead of with a jobs creation program inside the administration for failed bankers and failed regulators. A stimulus--including a jobs program--strong enough to prevent the hemorrhaging of 700,000 jobs a month and a muscular approach to the bad actors who had crashed the economy would have gotten the public firmly behind the President and the Democrats, demonstrating to the average voter that they have a choice between one party that's on their side and another that's not. Instead, the White House just blurred the lines between the parties so the average American couldn't tell the difference.
With all its efforts to tack to the center, the White House missed the point. The issue isn't about right or left. It's about whose side you're on. In Massachusetts, the voters believe they know. It's now up to the President and his party to convince the American people otherwise.
30 Comments so far
Show AllLet the stupid democrats pack up and shut up. They deserve every loss that they receive but the country unfortunately does not deserve the results. STupid democrats!
If Obama had truly turned health care reform over to Congress it might have actually turned out less toxic. What Obama actually did was intervene every time it looked like corporate interests might need to compromise. Obama was in each case able to jettison another populist aspect of health care reform to the point that the final bills included no industry compromises and total capitulation of any real reform.
Obama's Sept. 9, 2009 health care reform speech blatantly admonished Congress to preserve insurance company profits.
Excellent points!
"I am a Democrat" and to articulate what that means.
I can help Obama with that. It means we are the other party that supports the rich and powerful. We are just less "in your face" about it. We sugar coat our support of the corporate state with a thin veneer of populism. A faux support of the common man.
Well now the Republicans have learned that trick, and the parties move even closer to being indistinguishable from each other in how the deal with the needs of the common American.
Folks we are screwed.
Being caught forever in a corporate good cop/bad cop swindle is what one might expect from the most ignorant, childish and cowardly electorate in the industrialized world.
Tony Vodvarka
Yea it made me want to gag when I heard the Republican supporters cheer when they knew their corporately owned candidate won. Like HE is going to do anything to make their lives better. Idiots.
Idiots yes, but confused and befuddled, angry and frustrated, exploited and mislead, and very powerful -- using the Move On model for the "cash bomb" to put Brown over the top.
Watch out for the stupid ones, they have a vicious bite.
Gary
Can you say President Palin ?
The Amurkan masses are just as stupid as the Dimocratic Party jackasses now and careening from GOP to DLC to GOP again ain't going to do anything to make the problems these two partisan prick-herds created over the last 30 years any less disastrous. Because there is no united authentic progressive movement or Third Party preparing to seize the opportunity of the Dimocrats' fall this country is going to go for a very rough ride as the voters keep shirking off both Parties in turn, the plutocrats keep ante-ing up the campaign lucre to buy another round of D.C. puppets and the problems of the nation and the world fester beyond redemption.
Today must be the day for authors like this to extoll the bs mem about competition between the parties(third I've seen today). It is all nonsense. The dems and repubs are all playing their parts according to script. The democrat party isn't stupid, they are actors.
Today's talking point;
oh those stupid dems screwed the pooch.
You are stupid if you believe it.
"The issue isn't about right or left. It's about whose side you're on."
How the hell do you come up with that arithmetic?
Let me explain. RIGHT is on the side of corporate wealth and power. In fact ALL wealth and power. LEFT is on the side of the 90% of the population that has to work for a living.
There is no LEFT in the United States.
All these liberals who talk about politics not being about LEFT or RIGHT make me want to hurl.
"The issue isn't about right or left."
Richard is right. Whatever you call it, liberalism, or the left, has been destroyed at the federal level. The terms of debate need to be changed. Liberal v. conservative or left v. right fail to convey the real conflict.
In November I offered a "simple" explanation at davedubya.com. The bottom line: It is really a matter of corporatism v. democracy.
"The bottom line: It is really a matter of corporatism v. democracy." This is fine, though I haven't seen your simple explanation yet. But that just redefines the same situation. Corporatism v. democracy=right v. left. We can be tired of right/left framing and narratives, but the reality remains the same.
Unless by "democracy" we mean some complicated accommodation to capitalism, which has forever been the case with any incarnation of the American left that managed to temporarily succeed before getting smashed once again by the reactionary right. (See Obama & Coakley in Mass.) If we're afraid of the word "left", that's what we'll get again, and again, and again: returning to Bush/Cheney ideology because the conciliatory liberals are happy as clams with capitalism.
This is what happens when Obama is dithering and dicking around. He got just what he deserves.
See what all the giving in to the Repiggies in the name of "bipartisanship" have brought you.
Instant Karma
Barack's Company and (CIA TORTURE AND MURDER of even) three's a crime! Pelosi and Conyers, impeach Obama!! (And prosecute Cheney?Bush et al)!!!
Americans know that whatever happens, the poor will inherit the earth and a rich man cannot push a camel through a needle to get to heaven. What corporation thought up that claptrap to keep the sheeple quiet.
All of these reads advise Obama to be someone he is not. And even if he does change his tune, it may sound hollow, obligatory, rehearsed, insincere.
Things have steadily gone from bad to worse and only in the case of divine intervention or Obama sees the light on the road to Damascas, the worm has already turned.
And, btw, those over at the Huffington Post, shouted down and censored anyone who wasn't pushing the usual "give-him- time" mantra long after it became apparent that things were getting worse with the passage of time.
Yea, "if they don't learn the right lessons...". But Dems always learn the wrong lesson. Am I the only one who read Nader's "Life of the Party." They learn the wrong lesson because that's who they really are. They are comfortable being corporatists. They think of themselves as special meritorious individuals, i.e. elitists who should be rewarded. Rightward is where they want to go. Let them go there. We don't have to follow and we don't have to be so spiteful that we elect Republicans. We need a really progressive party. Any Dems want to bolt? Any takers? ...................... I thought so.
I think many have bolted (disclosure: I was never among them--Nader, McKinney, etc.) but they have nowhere to go, politically. Everyone is talking up third parties, including moi, but no one has anything coherent to say because the only one said much about is the Greens, and opinions about them are hopelessly mixed, confusing and vague. So far, they haven't done much, there is crazy infighting, self-sabotaging, inertia, basically dysfunction, so not many on the disenfranchised progressive left are inclined to go there. We're not going to form a third party on the internet, though it can help a lot, it's even essential, but we MUST begin to assemble physically, and not just for meaningless protests and demonstrations uniformly ignored by media. No more orange jump suits with black hoods parading silently in front of the White House, seen only on YouTube. Why aren't people like us gathering in the big cities, for Chrissakes, and trying to hammer out some approach that can systematically dismantle, even disembowel, both wings of the Business-War Party? What does it take? 50% unemployment? I'm beginning to think so.
"Why aren't people like us gathering in the big cities, for Chrissakes, and trying to hammer out some approach that can systematically dismantle, even disembowel, both wings of the Business-War Party?" -- Ephraim
I have been asking the same questions! I also agree that we need to be physically assembling, etc.
Ideas -- anyone?
Look. Would you like us to come down and invade your country again? We did it in 1812 and we hoped it was for the last time, but jezzus, you people just can't get yer act together, can you?
Then again, we could win again and then we'd be stuck with you. Who needs that?
Best of luck to you. (Not that you deserve it, but we're Canadians and we gotta be polite, eh?).
Regards,
Canada
Please, no more about Obama and the Dems must start showing us what side they're on. Theat's what they've been doing. Denial doesn't change reality.
It's a game like ping pong. The American people are played for fools. Both parties offer us up to Wall St at bargain basement prices. Back and forth we go. Fed up with Repubs, vote Dem, sick of the Dems, back to the Thugs. Either way, Wall St. wins and we lose. Our corporate media's job is to make sure nothing and nobody threatens the two party system and it's working like a charm. Third party candidates are mocked, minimized, and shut out ignored.
After Bill Clinton was elected the Dem leadership party made a conscious decision to forgo the American people to stay in power by sucking up to the same Wall St. consitituents as the Repubs. Fascist Democrats were created,the Blue Dogs. They are simply Republicans brought into the Dem party to loot us for corporation gain. I'd rather have a Democratic minority ready to fight for a true Dem platform than this mega con job that ALWAYS fails, despite the bogus pretense.
They're laughing at us. Yukking it up with the warmongers and banks. Either party, same results.
I have no doubt Obama will not change course on anything, though he'll talk it up. He can't. Wall St. won't stand for it. They'll just go Thug again. It makes no differnece to them, either party will do.
Third, fourth, fifth, etc. parties will never happen in the US without major electoral reform. The "system" is stacked against innovation. The payoff from the current political and electoral status quo is too great to allow for substantial change. How do you think Glen, Rush, Sean, and the rest of the singing apes would react if election day was moved to Sunday? If multiparty, instant runoff elections were suggested? How 'bout ending the Electoral College? Complete public financing of campaigns?
If you think the Democrats can be taught a lesson, the trick is getting voters to see they can register a protest as effectively by voting left of the Democrats as they can by swinging back to the Republicans.
If you think the Democrats can't learn, and I'm pretty much with you, then it doesn't matter anyway.
"We have competing ideas in a democracy--and hence competing parties--for a reason."
No, we do not.
We instead have the pro-choice and pro-life wings of the corporate party.
"The White House has squandered the greatest opportunity to change both the country and the political landscape since Ronald Reagan." While truckloads of readers here get it, these pundits never do.
BHO didn't squander anything. He had no intention of changing the political landscape. Master gave him all the money he needed TO BURY US. End Game. If taken from this perspective, every significant thing he's done makes perfect sense: "Transfer all wealth to the top 1/4 of 1% by any means necessary while degrading and debasing the general population into compliance, conformity, and obedience." And of course if the plebs get hungry and make noise, well, the camps are already in place, the military is poised domestic deployment. They've already allocated the resources. Plenty of money for that.
We get it. They don't. Not all of them are naive. Some know exactly what's going on and they are Dim/Repug enablers.
All of a sudden, the Pubs are concerned about spending? The same party that brought us endless war funded off-budget?
http://www.costofwar.com/
Obama and the Democrats, like the Republicans, are only interested in making hay while the sun shines. They are raking in the money hand over fist while this nations sprints toward complete paralysis, then collapse. They will then leave the country, leaving all of us behind as serfs, peons and indentured servants.
The backlash from those who rallied behind Obummer only to have their hope dumped in the dust is starting. The Change We Can Believe In was never defined. It's more obvious every day that this Administration's policies have followed the course laid out by the Administration which preceded it. Inspired more by Mussolini than Marx.
I realize that Government is a juggernaut, whose direction can not be changed easily. The best one can hope is that it will be veered a bit more in a direction one favors. But to see scads of dollars shoveled into the coffers of corporados and banksters, and then to be told that there's no funds available for universal health care is the next to the last straw. The last straw will be when the out-of-pocket cost of this insurance company bailout with it's iffy coverage hits home. That's when the tumbrils will roll.
An acceptable first step would be Medicare for All and a recognition of the fact that a healthy population is an asset to our country, and a national insurance plan would be an attraction to industries and companies who then do not have to deal with what they perceive to be a headache.
This would not cut out the insurance companies, who would be able to sell policies to cover the Medicare Gap. Are there problems with the system? Probably. Sure. It is at least a start, and a start we need to make.
Obummer championed Single Payer while campaigning, then makes back room deals with Big Insurance and Big Pharma. He could redeem himself if he were to show some cojones for a change, call on the people for support, and demand Medicare for All from Congress. It would take courage to make such a principled stand. I have not seen the President take a principled stand on anything. I wonder if he has any that he cares to stand up for.
Taxes would have to go up, but the 'load' would be more equitably distributed, and it will cost considerably less and be considerably better than the insurance-dominated medical care we get now.
If we can prevent Congress from mixing the revenue generated into the general fund where they can 'borrow' it as they have the Social Security fund, that would be a big step as well.
I agree with this great summary of Obama, who is either a complete fraud or the most incompetent President in the history of the US. In a parliamentary system he would be gone by the end of 2010 at the latest.
Anyone who ever again votes for a Democrat or a Republican is part of the problem. If you can't vote for someone who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, would you at least stay home to avoid making a bad situation worse and to avoid making a fool of yourself?