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After the Massachusetts Massacre
And yet Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself. Yes, last week’s political obituaries were ludicrously premature. Obama’s 50-ish percent first-anniversary approval rating matches not just Carter’s but Reagan’s. (Bushes 41 and 43 both skyrocketed in Year One.) Still, minor adjustments can’t right what’s wrong.
Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.
That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.
Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues — despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right — but voters don’t care.
Does health care matter? Not as much as you’d think after this yearlong crusade. In the Post/ABC poll, the issue was second-tier — at 24 percent. Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”
Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.
Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.
It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering.
On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers. He has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately — and markedly after political disaster struck last week — but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.
The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows. This is at best a makeshift solution.
Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground. Obama must also reconnect. The former community organizer whose credit card was denied at the Hertz counter during the 2000 Democratic convention now spends too much time at the White House presiding over boardroom-table meetings and stiff initiative rollouts instead of engaging with Americans not dressed in business suits.
When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.
It’s become so easy to pin financial elitism on Democrats that the morning after Brown’s victory the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had the gall to accuse them of being the “one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies.” Never mind that the Bush White House gave us the bank (and A.I.G.) bailouts, or that the G.O.P. is even more in hock than Democrats to corporate patrons. The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.
Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.
The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.
Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”
Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.
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Show AllHere's why Frank the elitist shill is a laugh a minute: "It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America."
Today's Rasmussen tracking on the Man of Change:
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 24% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -17.
Frank the shill does not seem to be able to read into polls. He looks at the general pop polls showing the man of change 50/50. That's meaningless. The above poll is what happened in MA. But Frank the shill is blinded by his elitist blinders, which convince the self-serving Frank that if he supports a rich, Ivy League black man, then he too, Frank, is an advanced human being no matter if he policies echo and amplify those of the Texas cowboy in every significant way.
The first thing I heard on the radio this morning was Snowbama promoting the reconfirmation of Ben Bernanke, one of Snowbama's seven insiders responsible for the meltdown not mentioned by Rich.
Frank Rich's offense is that he writes as though the U.S. had a chance of redemption. It is hard to see how that could happen, but harder to give up.
Health care was not the only place where a Public Option was essential; the citizens of the U.S. need a Public Option BANK.
The right is correct to be terrified of the very idea of Public Option. A Public Option would not IMPOSE socialism on the country; rather, individuals would be able to CHOOSE socialism by investing in the Public Option.
Voting is a useless sham. Money talks, bull$#!+ walks. We must find a way to put our money where our progressive mouths are.
Nice, I thought that line didn't make sense - appreciate the reference...
Let's get real obstructionists of the purist left!
Obama HAS reversed course from Bush regressive policies in some important ways-
the problem is the measures are baby steps and not nearly sufficient for the change
we need.
The Bushites would never have proposed the Stimulus Bill and 99% of Republican Obstructionists voted against it. Without the Stimulus, the Great Recession would have already have slipped into the 2nd Great Depression with millions more jobs lost.
My own relatives and friends have been rescued from falling into the economic abyss by the extension of Unemployment benefits which Republican obstructionists blocked for months just recently.
But it was not enough and targeted towards the wrong things like "Cash for Clunkers"
instead of mass transit operations and weaning us from auto addiction.
Bush and the Republican regressives would also have never passed even the modest
Credit card reforms and again voted lockstep against them.
Again without mandating caps on usurious interest rates of 18% as Credit Unions have to follow it is not enough.
Obama has kept his promises to college students - the privatized student loan racket with taxpayer subsidies is being abolished to go to direct gov't student loans. And also the biggest expansion of college loans since the GI Bill after WWII
for veterans. Again opposed by alleged veterans' supporters like McCain and my Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen.
Censorship of scientists over global warming has been ended and Steven Chu has
forthrightly warned that California is in big trouble if the Sierra snowpack melts.
But again the change is not enough - the quickest way to cut oil usage and greenhouse emissions is to drastically up the gas tax and use it to fund mass transit operations and expansion which Secy of Transportation Ray LaHood says he is
afraid to touch. Since autos/trucks account for 70% of US oil usage and 30% of greenhouse emissions running mass transit and expanding it could easily save 10% of oil usage in a year.
Furthermore instead of a simple carbon tax, Wimpocrats have crafted an incredibly complicated trading scheme of carbon credits trading.
But do not fool yourselves- Republican Regressives would be far worse!
Sioux Rose
RICH M: In my dreams: you are featured on FOX news (or CNN) in this way: while all the latest lies are passed off to the public as truth, as opposed to planned hearsay, the SPLIT SCREEN has you on the opposing side doing the equivalent of a "translation" of events, offering what IN FACT is taking place, what IN FACT the elaborate kabuki dance steps by "both" parties and their representatives mean. And where possible exposing other fictions, as necessary.
If the dream came to pass, I assure you the pay would be worth it.
Just being better than Republicans is not what is needed now. Obama is better than Hitler or Ghengis Khan, too. So what?
If the voters who need some economic justice don't see any movement towards it from the Democrats, they will not bother to support them (I certainly won't, but, then, I voted for McKinney anyway), and the Republicans will win by default.
"Obama is better than Hitler or Ghengis Khan, too. So what?"
Are you sure about that? Our history books are written by the same types of people who currently write for the New York Times.
Our impressions of foreign bad-guys is a matter of homeland security, and not a way of understanding the truth about human relations or novel ideas about politics and society.
Both Hitler and Ghengis Khan polled a lot better than Obama after one year of power. And that's all that matters to their corporate sponsors who are constantly trying to figure out what type of spin to offer the public next.
Your comments are well taken. However, where I believe you err is in the matter of war and the vast, vast influence this will likely have on all of the so called baby steps you speak about. You see, Obama has expanded war in way that the Neocons could only dream of. His killing of Pakistani's is far more expansionary than Bush's killing of Iraqis. Look at the numbers: seven million Pakistani's living abroad. Census estimates of Pakistani's living in US 200k but the embassy estimates 500k. In the UK there are over 1 million. In this way, Obama is laying the grounds for a terrorist attack within Europe or the US. Mr. Obama has proven that he loves war. That is a given, there is no equivocation in that regard and this has been proven with Obama's expanding the military budget significantly more than Bush and more than any president since WWII in real dollars despite a mandate to do otherwise. And here is what Obama is doing and I say this with the greatest regret and sadness. By killing Pakistani's as if they are subhuman's in his viciously racist attacks on the poor with Hellfire missiles from drones and managing to get people like Mr. Rich to put their hands over their eyes and fingers in their ears, Obama is hoping, unconsciously or not, to incite a major terrorist attack against the US, at which he can respond with an even greater and more vicious attack of his own. That is Mr. Obama's modus operendi, and that is why you are wrong in thinking he's actually improving the lot of the world. Perpetual expansionary war will lead to far more misery than your relatives not getting their unemployment handout.
I just hope the "terrorists" don't target the working class with their next agitprop. After all, it's the elite who is forcing the other strata of society to kill *other poor people.*
Only the Western Elite benefit.
"Let's get real obstructionists of the purist left!"
Yeah, like those who oppose war crimes, killing innocent children - the purists!
The ACLU says Obama is following in GW Bush's footsteps, actually furthering some of the worst policies, which makes Obama worse than Bush! ACLU? A bunch of "purists!"
So you can just dream on, if that suits you. In the meantime, Francis Boyle, the world renown University of Illinois professor of Constitutional and International law has filed a complaint to the International Criminal Court against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice. He plans to file one against Barack Obama soon, unless Obama immediately stops the secret rendition program, which is highly illegal.
So there you have it! I make a habit of bashing international war criminals, do you? Or do you save your ire only for those with an R next to their names? .... something to think about.
"Here's why Frank the elitist shill is a laugh a minute."
You know, this may be just what we needed, to see how the double standard Obama supporters would deal with the Full Monty, Obama's pants down, everything hangin' right out there for all to see. It's disgusting and the Democratic leadership will do everything it can to lose the majority. It's just awful for them to have this majority and the executive to boot. They need their excuses back!
Chris Floyd wrote this article just before our Obama won the election:
A Prism for the New Paradigm - What If Bush Did It?
Obama has been the greatest gift to the empire. What we have is socio/political "Shock and Awe."
November 22,1963: The day of the American coup D' etat. Ever since then, American Presidents have been held hostage.
Exactly what I was thinking. JFK had the courage to do what was right for the American people...unfortunately, the Powers that Be had other ideas. Hard to blame Obama for being a little cautious.
"JFK had the courage to do what was right for the American people"
I wouldn't be so sure of that. He had plans to put civil rights on the table and some peace plans too but look close and you'll find that he procrastinated out of fear. JFK did not deserve to die despite his tendency to procrastinate. You do know that JFK's people had bought the election for him in 1960 although Nixon wasn't any cleaner either, no? LBJ was bold enough to push for Civil Rights and did not hesitate to grab some Republicans from the North just like Bush counting on Democrats to pass his policies. That kinda made up for Vietnam. Obama won't lose his life regardless since there's plenty of modern technology to protect him but he's already cornering himself to one term presidency very "cautiously". Like Obama, JFK was also charming and had a rather attractive wife whose looks made me wonder what the hell JFK was doing messing around with Marilyn Monroe while he was president. Thank God he wasn't impeached though. But maybe had he lived through his term and possibly made it to second term, he would have been careful to pass civil rights without the affirmative action luggage rather than allow lobbyists to mess up the language and create new discrimination. I think JFK was like MLK in believing in a color blind society. One more thing. Don't forget JFK's reduction of corporate taxes and Bay of Pigs which he could have avoided by not falling for the trick of opposing socialism when he campaigned. Now don't get me wrong. He wasn't a centrist like Clinton or Obama but he got some things right and some things wrong. At least he didn't kill the labor unions or escalate Vietnam.
Sioux Rose
MAX: From your post it would seem that you have not yet read, "JFK & The Unspeakable. Why He Died and Why It Matters." I believe if you did, your analysis of JFK would go a lot deeper. Just a suggestion.
I have heard some possibilities that the CIA set up Kennedy's assassination but I can't imagine the CIA being that powerful back in the early 1960s. I don't know Kennedy's campaigning in 1960 very well but I had assumed that he did like Obama of playing "conservative" just to get into office but not as badly so. It will be interesting to find out why a man who served 4 years in the Navy, 6 in the House from MA's 11th district, then in the Senate before running for White House suddenly turned different. Another thing that bugs me is that JFK was going to censure Joseph McCarthy but there too he just let him go. A Republican co-worker of mine once told me that Kennedy could have teamed up to censure McCarthy but refused. I looked that up too and was disappointed. Some say Kennedy was liberal while others say he was conservative.
The title of that book sounds interesting. I think I might be judging based on his limited time in office along with JFK being compared to Clinton and Obama on charm. I was thinking that we would never really be able to predict exactly what Kennedy would have done in his remaining years of his first term or in his second term were he to win it. I'll still be interested in reading that book when I get back.
Hi Sioux Rose!
I agree, the book, J.F.K. & The Unspeakable, is important, and well worth the time it takes to read.
Sioux Rose
Hi Kay: Since I don't have TV I appreciate when you share what you learn from certain programs and documentaries.
As for the JFK book, we all have opinions that we cherish; but the ones qualified by access to information that's been researched by dedicated sources of course hold more weight.
I have learned of several key resource books in this forum, and while there are still more on my list to read, I am very grateful for those that were made known to me. I consider CD my "continuing education," for that reason.
The other day I posted a vision that came through me... that this forum is very possibly a reflection of a senate that convened in another time. We are truly the ones called to it for the purposes of a cross-pollination of critical cutting edge ideas, plans, conceptions, and inspiration. And of course, there is also the fact that since we are among the first to awaken, our numbers are limited. Many of us feel misunderstood by those still asleep; so we gain strength from the knowledge that there are others (in the senate/forum) who also see what we see.
Not all chicks break through their shell walls at the same time. That analogy helps me to make peace with "timing. Right now the winds are really rocking and rolling, and I PRAY there are no tornadoes. When I first moved here a tornado struck late at night and lifted people out of their beds and tossed them into a nearby lake. Not exactly the trip Dorothy signed up for in her search for the Wizard of Oz. Yet with nature as restless as any Mother abused by too many of her offspring, the weather is entirely out of joint. 80 degrees here today, 20 last week... imagine what the trees and birds think? Pretty soon the rocks will exfoliate!
Paul Revere, I was only 21 on that day. But as I watched the Oswald fiasco and the cover up, I was confounded that Americans were covering their eyes and ears to the truth. I was essentially apolitical at that time, a busy young mother with two babies. But I concluded that Americans were afraid to face the truth. If they buried their heads in the sand, they could go on pretending they lived in a democracy. But I no longer believed that.
Another interesting cover up: For three days after the assassination, there was no regular TV programming, and the Zapruder tape was replayed over and over. Now, many years later, it is asserted that it was never shown until late 1970s sometime, and when I saw it recently, it was NOT the tape I originally saw. It was altered to show a blood spray in front of JFK's head. Why not? Most of the people seeing it now weren't even alive then, and most of the people who saw it then are dead. So yes, history does get rewritten, and successfully. There's a good reason why the records were ordered sealed for 40 years. Meanwhile convenient things happen - such as the JFK autopsy records being destroyed in a Bethesda Naval Hospital basement fire. But let's not get paranoid here.
Not all American Presidents have been held hostage. Some of them have been willing collaborators.
I read that some legal beagle in the Obama administration, a close friend of the President, wants to infiltrate "extremist" websites and discussion threads to find and investigate "conspiracy theorists". Shades of Orwell! I wonder if Obama supports that idea. From his track record, I would guess he does.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
RichM, how old were you when JFK was assassinated?
Don't take as gospel everything you read in Wikipedia.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
RichM, What impressed me was seeing the film of JFK clutching his neck (first shot), then his head snapping back (second shot) and NO spray of blood forward. When and where the Hell did that come from?? I've read about the film being reconstructed before it's midseventies release, the three days in November having faded into history. I never saw the revised version until recently and was shocked. That's not what I remembered seeing.
When Oswald was accused, I didn't see how Kennedy could possibly be shot from behind and above and react as he did. If I hadn't seen the film, I wouldn't have questioned the Oswald story. What shocked me was that others weren't questioning. As I stated, I wasn't political then, but how could the whole country ignore what it saw? I realized that it had to be a conspiracy, and if people questioned the official version, they might be confronted with the fact that we were not really a democracy which by then I realized was the case. I concluded they were afraid and took refuge in denial. I have a good friend who did the same. She has a vague recollection of the film, and when I asked her how she reconciled the tape with the story line, she said she didn't think about it. Just didn't connect them.
It is controversial. I don't know what research you've done, but in the 1980s some of the Dallas ER doctors came forward to describe a massive exit wound in the back of JFK's head, witnesses said they weren't allowed to tell the Warren Commission what they saw but only what the Warren Commission wanted to hear, other witnesses said they kept their mouths shut in fear after a number of mysterious deaths were reported. I believe the number was 17. I remember reading the connection each death had with the assassination.
In the 1960s the media was not on such a short leash as now.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Puh-leeze. Are you kidding? The Zapruder film was NOT on tv in 1963. It is absolutely ridiculous to imagine, and assert, that it was.
I believe his name is Cass Sunnstein, an old Harvard Law School friend...
Probably knows John Yoo, late of Berkeley.
I was your age 11/22/63. Single, living in a rent control apt in Lower Manhattan and working for the NYTimes as a "morgue" clerk.
I was political as hell but I never saw it coming.
After I quit the Times I went back a few weeks later to connect and my old boss said something like "we got a visit from your friends."
What friends? The investigators from the PEACE CORPS. My old boss assumed that I had applied for the Peace Corps. I had not. Who were those Suits who investigated me? And got the full cooperation of the NYTimes...
A couple of decades later, while trying to update my portfolio I discovered that I no longer exist at the NYTimes. I hope they paid properly into my Social Security account... I had been one of two copy boys to the Editors of the Editorial Page during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Irony: both of us from Ohio.
Then came the Oswald assassination by Jack Ruby, and I've been essentially PTSD ever since! My father had voted consistently for Adlai Stevenson. Who, as you may recall, fell over dead on a London Street while JFK-appointed UN Ambassador...
We will never be "told" the "truth." We just have to believe "our own lying eyes." Especially at our age now!
As for the Zapruder film, I, too, have a (vague) memory of repeat after repeat of the car at the Dallas Plaza as his wife reaches towards him.
Generational PTSD? Generational trauma? Depends on how we reinterpret it, but everything I grew up believing about the United States was shattered that day.
***
Anyway, I've noticed your postings and mostly agree with them. This is my first attempt at using the "reply" button.
-30-
OleManRiver, I appreciate your response. My memory is not vague. It is clear, because I realized that we were only pretending to be a democracy. I just couldn't believe they could get away with a lie about the direction of a bullet. I went into an 8 month depression, knowing that my country was not what I thought it was and that the American people didn't want to know the truth.
And I couldn't have seen it in 1975. I didn't even have a TV after I left my husband in 1972.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Rich is smart. He nailed Obama's hide to the wall and pointed out the Democrats have no clothes. But he still believes that the Democratic Party is worth saving -- and it is not. It is too corrupted by corporations and special interests, leaning too far to the right (the Republican are so far to the right they are in near-Earth orbit) and too deaf to the real wishes of the American people. They had a super-majority and still couldn't get a decent health-reform bill through the Senate!
No Frank, cut the Democratic Party loose and come toward the light. Go third-party.
Gary
PS BTW I am suggesting the name "The People" for a new unity party to bring together the dozen or so "third-parties" that better represent the actual positions of the American people than the present duopoly. Imagine campaigning for "The People."
Has Frank ever written the third-grade logic into one of his columns that there is no such thing as a war on terror because terrorism is a method not a country or even a movement. And if there were such a war as Mr. Obama claims, to end it instantly, all Obama would have to do would be to withdraw troops and bases from the Eurasian Peninsula or begin the process. Has this third grade logic ever occurred to this man? Or does he just not have the guts to write it in this holy newspaper of newspapers. Frank is a shill, a super elite. He oozes this way or that, depending on the direct the ooze of change is moving. He's never written a brave word in his life, as far as I can see.
What are the CD editors smoking, that they feel the need to dredge up dreck like this propaganda-piece? Translate it into Russian and I'd have a flashback, thinking I was reading Pravda or Izvestiya.
EARTH to Frank Rich, the fix has been in for some time now.. Mr. Obama represents Mr. Bush's 3rd term.
HELLO.. is anybody home?
IT must be a slow news day for the good folks at CommonDreams to post this useless drab (time 4 deTox?)
"It was not a referendum on Barack Obama." This is rich. what was it then?
And the other bit of 'wisdom' being installed is that it wasn't about healthcare. If I had to prioritize an answer to a poll, I might answer "the economy" or "jobs" first, but that doesn't mean that worry about jobs and the economy is not the same reason people turned out to vote against the 60th vote for corporate healthcare.
Frank Rich: Apparatchik.
Mr. Rich has forgotten how Bill Clinton secured his second term by adopting the republican agenda and how Obama has already agreed to a bipartisan commission on the deficit which will come up with right wing solutions which he will adopt. In other words Obama realizes how right wing Americans are and he will seek his new majority there despite using populist rhetoric. The left in America is a very small group so small that even the third party movements always come from the right. The country is becoming more and more like the south everyday.
The left is a small group? You mustn't have read NORC's surveys.
Americans are not so much right-wing as underinformed. Most never read a book in their lives, preferring, after a 12 years of "education" designed to make one hate learning, to stick their heads up the rectum of a junk culture designed to numb and manipulate you. Look at the "tea-baggers" with their misspelled, ungrammatical signs. Then look at public opinion polls, where people express a desire for single-payer health care, less war spending, better protection for the environment. Where's the disconnect? Right now, YOU, reading this; name your congressman. Your city officials. Your state rep.s. Hell, name your neighbor...
Hey, the Rich article isn't so bad... not long on insight but if you want a real laugh, not to mention confirmation that Obomber is sure to be a one termer, read David Plouffe's WaPo article on the Massachusetts election. Jeez! Talk about not getting it! If the Mass. election was a wake-up call, this guy's response is to hit the snooze button... Maybe "PaulRevere" (below) is right. At least from 11/22/63 it seemed that, no matter whom you voted for, nothing ever changed. In '64 Johnson beat Goldwater by saying no to war in VietNam. '68, Nixon beat the Hump by saying he had a plan to get us out. Reagan beat Carter saying his economic plan would end the national debt. Bush beat Gore saying he'd end foreign wars and nation-building. This Prez ran as a peace candidate. Get the picture? The President is like the Activity Director on a cruise ship; visible, energetic, always telling you what you're going to do today, tomorrow. But he ain't running the ship. That's the captain's job and you never see him. Nor, evidently, is he ever up for election. And, yeah, 3rd parties! The ONLY way NOT to throw away your vote.
I agree Mr. Rich is in denial about the president's poll numbers, and about the supposed difference between Dems and Repubs; but his criticisms of and suggestions for Obama, and his assessment of how much time is left to right the ship, are on target. Unfortunately as rudyspeaks said, "he ain't running the ship."
"It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America."
Thats personal popularity Frank! Nothing more. Denial is good for the soul I hear though.
For a different analysis, try this: Alice in the Asylum over at Grumpy Lion on Wordpress.
"It’s time for him to stop deluding himself."
With respect, it's time for Frank Rich to stop deluding himself. Obama is doing exactly what one would expect of a DLC member mentored by Joe Lieberman.
"The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative."
How true. How true.
And Obama thinks taking 90 billion back from the banks will somehow compensate for the 14 trillion the financial industry received from the Fed, FDIC, and Treasury, on top of the TARP?
I do not mean to sound like some kind of pointy headed "elitist" when I ask: how many Americans understand the effects repealing Glass Steagall had on creating the current mess? And how many understand that a hard wall between investment banks and commercial banks has to be reestablished? They know that top corporate officers and wheeler dealers are making off with fortunes in bonuses. But without a deeper understanding Wall Street and the administration or Congress could simply pull a fast one on us.
Unfortunately, nearly all the major issues facing us are enormously complicated. Just wading through the jargon of Wall Street can be a heavy slog for the uninitiated, such as myself. And it takes time, time not many busy Americans have, to grasp some of these issues. At the current moment it looks as if Obama is only putting up a partial regulatory wall which Wall Street operators can get around.
We need more action than Obama is promising, and without a deeper popular understanding of the problems he may get away with partial action. Or try to. For nothing will be in the way of another disaster.
Gary Goodman,
Good idea re a name for a new umbrella/coalition party. I personally like the Greens, but I think organizing a 3rd party will be nighmarisly difficult as it is, we need to avoid the baggage attached to any existing group and start fresh.
I think "The People's Party" is a brilliant name.
People's Party v 2.0.
I hark a bit back to the People's (or Populist) Party of the 1890s, but we need a new organization, not a revival of an old one. That's why I suggest "The People" or "The People Party" as a name.
Gary
"An elaborate and detailed review of the action and procedure of the Democratic party would be more voluminous than it is proposed to make this little document. It can be asserted, however, that for the present campaign, the Democratic manipulators, who have, through their National and State Conventions, made vociferous declarations and professions in favor of various reforms, have, as the initial movement of their campaign for 1898, completely and entirely ignored every profession heretofore made, have abandoned all discussion of every principle heretofore declared for, and have taken as a basis for their every action the old cry of "nigger."
This party has lost all hope of ever being able to convince the intelligent citizen and virtuous voter that there is any truthfulness or honesty in it, and as a last, desperate resort and despairing effort, has undertaken to arouse the wildest prejudice and fiercest passions of men and citizens toward one another, with the hope that they may gain by lying, lawlessness and riot, what they can never attain by argument, reason, record and truth."
-- PEOPLE'S PARTY HAND-BOOK OF FACTS. CAMPAIGN OF 1898.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/peoples/peoples.html
People's Party? Nah. Too much like "The People's Republic of China." How about "Peace" or ""Freedom" or "Justice"?
It's also kinda like "The Peoples Party" - you know Farmers' Alliances, the Peoples Party, also known as the Populists, a storm out of the midwest, etc.
So how about "The People's Party for Positive Progressive Policy?" (The PPPPP)
Ha, sounds like the members of the chess club fighting over what to call themselves. Knock yourselves out, no one will join.
Yeah, I suppose, but language is important here. The Green Party is not well named. It is about way more than the environment, for one thing. The name connotes the arrogance of upper middle class educated people who drive Priuses and want to take away the Ford F-150s from rural whites. Not likely to win many votes over most of the country.