On September 30th, 2008, shortly after I finished my stint with the Obama campaign, I attended a rally for Obama in Reno, Nevada. The financial collapse had just begun, and Obama, who had become famous delivering the 2004 DNC keynote address in which he called for America to unite, spent a good deal of his speaking time urging that the country come together. One passage in particular leaped out to me.
“There will be time to punish those who set this fire, but now is the moment for us to come together and put the fire out. This is one of those defining moments when the American people are looking to Washington for leadership. It is not a time for politics. It is not a time for partisanship. It is not a time to figure out how to take credit or where to lay blame.”
Even in the midst of the crisis, and even having just finished working for Obama, this line hit my ear poorly. It’s not the time for politics? It’s not the time to lay blame? It’s not time for a reckoning? If not now, when?
Obama never spent any time looking for the arsonist who lit the fire. He never attempted “politics” or “partisanship” to leverage people’s anger about the crisis into a meaningful sense of justice. Yes, Obama attempted to re-regulate Wall Street, in a compromise effort that seemed to make Wall Street furious and didn’t go far enough for real liberals like Bernie Sanders.
Wall Street may have complained, but they got the better end of that deal: in exchange for the help of Republican Senator Scott Brown, the reforms were watered down so much that the taxpayers, rather than the industry, had to foot the bill for implementing them. Wall Street saved billions and in return supported Scott Brown with millions — Wall Street certainly knows how to make a good return on an investment. When that wasn’t enough to save his seat in the Senate, he became a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, working to make Congress even more Bankster friendly.
Aside from those half-hearted measures, there was no sense of accountability. No sense that Wall Street had paid any price — figuratively or literally. In Obama’s ‘recovery’, the top 10% of income earners got richer, while those in the bottom 90% saw their incomes drop.
The “unity” Obama so keenly sought consisted of mainly deals like this — weakening or eliminating some key piece of the “change” agenda he promised in exchange for the support of a moderate Republican or a conservative Democrat. The price of Joe Lieberman’s vote was the elimination of the Public Option in Obamacare. A headline from the Center for Public Integrity summed up the consequences: Elimination of ‘Public Option’ threw consumers to the insurance wolves.
Just like there was no sense of reckoning with the Banksters who destroyed the economy, there was no sense of reckoning for liberals who were furious at conservative Democrats who were sabotaging Obama’s agenda. When conservative Democrat Blanche Lincoln faced a primary from a more liberal challenger, Obama supported Lincoln (she won the primary but then lost the general election to a real Republican.) Ben Nelson, who worked to weaken the stimulus and Obamacare, was rewarded with a half a million dollars in ads from the DNC, then bizarrely didn’t even bother running for re-election, handing his seat over to…you guessed it, a Republican.
Many liberals were also angry that Obama had appointed Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State. Clinton had run an ugly, race-baiting campaign against Obama in 2008. She had few accomplishments to speak of, using her 8 years in the Senate to vote for Bush’s war in Iraq and Bush’s Bankster-friendly bankruptcy bill. She also helped pass a woefully underfunded 9/11 recovery bill, but didn’t lift a finger when more money was needed, leaving the likes of Jon Stewart to pick up the slack.
As Secretary of State, the train wreck continued. She began her tenure seeking a “Russia Reset” to improve relations with that country, which began as a literal farce, and concluded with the United States and Russia having their worst relationship since the cold war.
She was the one who urged Obama to intervene in Libya, which became a fiasco, and Obama’s biggest regret of his own Presidency. Then she encouraged Obama to try to arm rebels in Syria, which didn’t work, and in which in at least one instance led to arms accidentally falling into the hands of ISIS.
She was a disaster for the environment, as detailed by Mother Jones’s expose: How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World.
Hillary Clinton wasn’t a champion on gay rights, asking the State Department to undo progress for gay parents because she said she was worried about what Fox News and Sarah Palin might think. She was one of the last Democrats to publicly affirm support for marriage equality.
It’s hard to imagine someone doing a worse job — the woman seemed to have a reverse Midas touch. Yet as her campaign began, the hits kept coming. She infamously improperly stored government emails on her personal server — the least of her offenses, in my book. She gave paid, secret speeches to Wall Street, which she refused to release to the public. In a supreme irony, when Wikileaks released the speeches, they revealed that Clinton had declared that one needs both a “public and a private position” on the issues to avoid public scrutiny during back-room deal making. No wonder she didn’t want us to see them.
And yet, in 2016, the Democratic National Committee went out of their way to support her against Sanders, rigging the primary with a mixture of delegate favor trading, debate scheduling, coordinating with the media to limit criticism of Hillary, leaking ‘town hall’ interview questions to her campaign in advance, voter suppression, voter “purges,” illegal electioneering, and possibly fraudulent voter tallies. An Election Justice report states what should be obvious: without the fraud, Bernie would have likely prevailed.
Even without their primary-rigging, there was an obvious stench of corruption at the DNC. In 2016, they quietly removed Obama’s ban on federal lobbyist contributions, allowing them to wallow even further in Bankster money. Obama was silent.
There was no reckoning with Hillary or the DNC. When Wikileaks exposed the truth about what they’d done, the chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, resigned, but was then hired by the Clinton campaign as an “honorary co-chair.” Hillary Clinton subsequently picked centrist and do-nothing Senator Tim Kaine to be her running mate instead of uniting the party by choosing Sanders. Kaine’s first foray onto the national stage had been a State of the Union rebuttal in 2006, in which he opined for the same kind of “Unity” Obama had long called for.
Obama and the Democratic Party he presided over asked us to vote for Hillary in spite of her flaws. They were aided by the mainstream media, who behaved more dishonestly during this cycle than perhaps any other in living memory. Here is the New York Times public editor admitting its own bias against Sanders in their own op-ed:
“The Times has not ignored Mr. Sanders’s campaign, but it hasn’t always taken it very seriously. The tone of some stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times. Some of that is focused on the candidate’s age, appearance and style, rather than what he has to say.”
The tone didn’t change, and after printing that piece, the paper went on to endorse Clinton, both in the general election and in the primary (the paper had also previously endorsed her against Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary.)
Meanwhile, ‘progressive’ sites like this one lost their minds. Markos was busy dishonestly shilling for Hillary during the primary and then attempting to silence debate when he discovered his own audience was against him. Sites like The Mary Sue and Salon compared Clinton to Hermione Granger. Maybe — if Herminone had been a Slytherin.
Once the general election season began, the lying seemed to go into overdrive. Matt Taibbi, in a must-read piece called “The Summer of Shill,” wrote of Trump:
“He is considered so dangerous that many journalists are beginning to be concerned that admitting the truth of negative reports of any kind about the Democrats might make them complicit in the election of the American Hitler.”
The press attacked Trump and lied about Clinton’s flaws with a zeal which was unprecedented, and certainly undeserved for a candidate like Clinton. Imagine if they’d been so openly partisan when it mattered, helping Bernie during the Democratic primary. Imagine if they’d been merely neutral during the Democratic primary!
Bill Maher, one of the very few television personalities to give full-throated support to Sanders, supported Hillary in the general and called the election “a referendum on decency.” Given her record, how was that framing supposed to help?
Sanders himself gallantly supported the Clinton and the Democratic party despite how it had treated him, but this wasn’t enough to blind his supporters to the truth. In the closing days of the general election campaign, a leader of a “students for Bernie” group gave an opening speech at a Hillary rally, only to suddenly go off script and attack Hillary as a total sellout who can only be trusted by her corporate donors and conservatives like Henry Kissenger. The crowd erupted into cheers.
Anger continued brewing but there appeared to be nothing left for liberals to do about it. A third party vote would be wasted — not because people have created an artificial assumption that this is so, but because the structure of our electoral system makes it mathematically impossible for a third party candidate to ever take power. So I foolishly assumed there was going to be no reckoning in November of 2016, either.
Like everyone else, I expected the Hillary to win anyhow, thanks to Trump’s repugnant racism and sexism and the fact that he seemed uninterested in the GOTV operations that had seemed so crucial to Obama’s victories.
I’d expected to have to write about the Democratic Party triumphant, having defeated both the Republicans and the liberals, and free to do whatever it wants for the Banksters and the frackers and the military industrial complex.
Instead, just like Bernie Sanders warned us during the primary season, Hillary Clinton wasn’t just an ethically and ideologically compromised candidate, she was also an unelectable one. Hillary’s much vaunted turnout operation, inherited from Obama, fizzled because the candidate it needed to turn out voters for was her. Her favorability ratings were the worst for any nominee in the history of the party. (Sanders, meanwhile, is the most popular Senator in the United States.)
Most liberals certainly didn’t want it to have to be this way. Wouldn’t it have been nicer if someone a little more sane — say, John Kasich or even Romney or McCain — was the beneficiary all this? But such is life — as a nation, we don’t have the privilege of choosing when we have to pay for our sins.
In the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign, Obama said his legacy was on the ballot. I agree. That legacy, as well as the legacy of Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the mainstream/progressive media during the Obama era, has been repudiated. At long last, the reckoning has finally come to pass.
