At the Huffington Post, Howard Fineman is grumpy because President Obama seems to be cruising to reelection without being held accountable for parts of his first-term record:
If American democracy is to work -- if we are to prevent the blood from clotting in the body politic -- presidential elections must be real contests over real ideas and real records, informed by real facts.Who's going to hold Obama accountable on these matters? The Republicans? In every listed case, the Republican approach either is precisely what Obama has done (leaving Gitmo open, treating the bankers with kid gloves rather than demanding real concessions on mortgages) or is an undiluted version of what Obama has done in an attempt to meet the right partway, with disappointing and sometimes dreadful results.
This campaign hasn't really been any of those things....
Unless I missed it, the president has yet to give a detailed answer to why he has failed to meet or even come close to his promises about reducing the unemployment rate....
He hasn't given a detailed answer as to why he and his top advisers, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, failed to focus sufficiently on reviving the housing market, rather than just bailing out banks.
He hasn't explained why his own administration is now saying that at least 6 million Americans, most of them in the middle class, will indeed face a tax increase (penalty) in 2014 if they do not buy health insurance....
He hasn't explained whether he shares any blame for the failure of budget talks on a grand compromise....
He hasn't given a detailed defense of the vast expansion of the security state under his watch....
He hasn't given a detailed explanation for why he didn't close Guantanamo....
Regarding unemployment, Obama gave us less Keynesianism than we needed, at Republicans' insistence, yet the Republican solution is even less than that; on health care, Obama gave us a plan based on right-wing think-tank ideas and the continuation of a for-profit system, rather than single-payer, but the Republicans want the system to be driven even more by the profit motive than it already is; on the budget, we need to start by collecting more tax revenue from the rich, but teabagger Republicans were never willing to go along with a bargain with that as a feature, and now their view is holy dogma in the GOP; on national security, we've needed less bellicosity, but Republicans have never stopped demanding even more.
Obama could be challenged on all these things -- but not by the other major political party we actually have. A truly progressive major party could do so -- but we don't have one.
5 comments:
Them Democrats sold their souls to the company stores donations.
We wouldn't even still have a Republican Party as it currently exists, if Democrats hadn't already started to exit Main Street in the 1960's and 1970's, allowing Reagan to use Nixon's Southern Strategy and flip the angry white middle class man and wife to Republicans.
Democrats would have won almost every major election if they hadn't abandoned Main Street for Wall Street.
And until they start to embrace regular people instead of bankers, the Republicans can get crazier and crazier.
Who's going to stop them?
And if we had a Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Obama and the Democrats in Congress wouldn't be talking about making some Grand Bargain after the election, which will benefit bankers and bond salesmen, but not Joe and Jane Sixpack.
The best friend the Republicans have, is today's Demcrats.
We don't have a "truly progressive" major party, as Fineman and many others would define that term; that's true. I suggest that the fundamental reason for that absence is the absence of a large enough electorate in the US to sustain such a party. It's not as if there haven't been plenty of lefty candidates, nationally as well as locally in some areas; but by and large, they simply haven't prevailed. One can argue that that's only because of the baleful, corrupting influence of money in our politics, and to an extent I'd agree; but, that influence is (for now, and for pretty much the entire period from 1865 to date, at least) a fact of political life here. Moreover, if the potential electorate for a lefty party is so susceptible to persuasion by the ads, etc., that money buys that it fails to push lefty candidates over the top time after time, then how much of a potential electorate was it in the first place?
I could wish it were otherwise, but for lots of reasons - many of them going back to how and by whom the nation was founded - I'm afraid that there just isn't a large enough "market" for a party which would qualify as "progressive" under Fineman's criteria to subsist in the USA. Subtract the South, and perhaps there would be; but, like money, the South is another political fact of life.
All this is to say, given the real-world possibilities as I see them, I'm vastly relieved that Obama and the Democrats - such as they are, with warts aplenty - look likely to prevail. I'm also vastly relieved that Obama didn't have to waste time and money fending off a primary challenge by some updated (and ultimately futile in terms of the national electorate) Henry Wallace. If that makes me a co-opted tool of corporate interests, well, so be it.
Well said, BH. One must come to terms with reality, no matter how much it diverges from what one wishes it were.
So true, and so sad.
If Obama is to blame for the "failure" of "budget talks" on a "grand compromise", then I salute him. And if Simpson-Bowles shows any signs of rising up again, put a stake in its heart at once.
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