I feel like one of Custer's relatives after the Little Big Horn.
Except that Tuesday's slaughter at the polls was not unexpected. It
marked the death knell of corporate liberalism, and it signed the death
certificate of petty gradualism.
I'm tired of the Democratic Party's excuses, and Barack Obama's apologists.
Yes, Bush and Cheney trashed the place like a couple of crazed heavy metal bands in a hotel room.
Yes, they left an exploding economy on Obama's desk.
Yes, the Republicans in Congress obstructed Obama at every turn and conspired to stop him at all costs.
Yes, the Republican rabble did everything in their power to discredit
him, from concocting the birther controversy to spreading the "Is he a
Muslim" nonsense.
And yes, the Supreme Court opened the corporate floodgates with its
execrable decision in the Citizens United case. As a result, spending by
undisclosed outside groups mushroomed by more than 500 percent from the
2006 midterm elections.
Those were the objective conditions, and they were about as nasty as they come.
But Obama didn't help himself by trying to placate the Republicans and by muddling his messaging.
He didn't help himself by lowballing the stimulus and by rejecting a moratorium on foreclosures.
He didn't help himself by playing a Washington insider game, by
trying to buy off a couple of Republicans in Congress and by playing
footie with huge industries, like the banks and the pharmaceutical
companies.
This was timid corporate liberalism, RIP.
Obama was given a mandate for change, and he squandered it.
He never mobilized the base to take on the vested interests.
Example: health care. He didn't call people to march on Washington
for universal health care, or at least Medicare for all who want it. So a
few tea party hucksters were able to hijack the debate. He didn't even
push Harry Reid to give the health care bill to Senator Tom Harkin's
committee, throwing it instead into the untrustworthy arms of Max
Baucus.
As a result, an inferior law came on the books with some important
insurance reforms in it, but it didn't threaten the private health care
providers or the pharmaceutical companies. And it didn't deliver the
immediate relief that most Americans needed.
On the jobs front, he refused to follow the lead of Christina Romer,
head of his Council of Economic Advisers, or the recommendations of
Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. All three said he
needed a stimulus package that was at least 50 percent larger than the
one he proposed. Nor did he propose a new WPA, like FDR did when the
country faced a similar, if not quite so staggering, free fall. Obama
was afraid to come on too strong. So he came on too weak.
Same on the banking front. Obama could have, and should have,
nationalized Bank of America and Citibank, or at the very least,
compelled them to halt foreclosures and write down the principal on all
their mortgages by 25 or 30 percent. But Obama didn't get anything from
the banks in exchange for the hundreds of billions of dollars the
Treasury doled out, and the trillions in guarantees. And so the bankers
laughed all the way to the vault, and even some Republicans scored by
running commercials against Democrats who voted for the bailout.
Same on the environment. Obama sold out the cause at Copenhagen, and
with amazingly bad timing he came out for offshore drilling just weeks
before the BP disaster, in hopes, again, of getting concessions from
Republicans and from industry.
His messaging was as poor as his governing. First he blamed the Wall
Street CEOs for their obscene bonuses; then he called them "very savvy
businessmen," adding: "I, like most of the American people, don't
begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market
system."
Similarly, on the budget, first he argued for deficit spending; then
he said we need to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term.
This was confusing to millions of Americans, dispiriting to the base, and diverting to his enemies.
But basically, he didn't give people enough tangible benefits to say,
OK, I'm with him. He's helped me. I'll vote for Democrats again.
You can't tell an unemployed person that you'd have been twice as
unemployed without my help. You need to give that person a job now.
You can't tell an elderly person you're closing the donut hole on prescription drugs--by the year 2020. You need to close it now.
You can't tell an adult with a pre-existing condition that you'll
force insurance companies to cover you--by the year 2014, when you may be
dead. You need to cover people now.
You can't tell families being foreclosed upon that you're trying hard
to keep them in their homes. You need to keep them in their homes now.
But to do any of that, Obama would have had to confront corporate
power head on. But he, and Rahm Emanuel, and Larry Summers, and Tim
Geithner were unwilling to do so and ideologically unprepared to even
consider it.
They lived by corporate liberalism. And Democrats around the country died by it.