This diary is too important to lose, I think it should be reflected upon and the lessons taken from it used to try to fix the damage that has been done by the continuation of Bush era policies and the destruction of the progressive agenda by the Obama Administration.
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AN HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY SQUANDERED: INCOMPETENCE OR INTENTION?
On election night 2008 Republicans must have been in a state of panic. The Democrats had just achieved a landslide election of a charismatic progressive president, and had captured overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and House. The Republican ‘brand’ was widely and robustly discredited after the disastrous Bush-Cheney years, and progressive Democrats were rightly poised to achieve "once in a generation" scale policy advances.
What happened next is a story for the history books.
The reality of what has transpired since election 2008 is an unprecedented and epic tale of squandered opportunity. Through a mind-boggling series of terrible political appointments, inexplicable policy judgments, and simple failure to lead, that once-invincible political advantage for Democrats has been completely fumbled away. Just one year after sweeping into Washington in an electoral tidal wave, Democrats have fallen so far they are facing the prospect of an unthinkable loss of Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts.
What the hell happened????
To begin, Obama immediately abandoned his central campaign theme of "change", and proceeded to make a series of crucial political appointments that delighted his Republican opponents and stunned his Democratic base. The man who many fervent supporters believed was to usher in a new era of progressive foreign policy, decided to keep most of the Bush-Cheney senior military and national security team in place. Whether this was a result of timidity or political miscalculation, the results have been devastating in terms of the political effect. The activist base of the Democratic party has watched in anguish as Obama has basically continued the Bush-Cheney policy of ever-expanding military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan....and ever-soaring military budgets. Meanwhile, any political gain anticipated in the "center" by appearing "tough" on foreign policy has been negated by steadfast Republican criticism regardless of the policy direction, aided in no small part by well-timed leaks and press manipulation by those same senior military commanders Obama decided to retain from the Bush Administration. Obama’s moves on Iraq and Afghanistan have been bad policy as well as bad politics, and have squandered the opportunity for Democrats to lead the nation in a new direction.
Similarly, Obama’s selections for his top economic team were taken directly from the same corporate titans of Wall Street that got us into the economic collapse of the past decade. At a time when the public was ready for strong re-regulation of the financial world, and a re-balancing of interests away from Wall Street and toward Main Street, Obama’s appointments and subsequent policy actions (and inaction) have failed miserably on both counts. Following eight years of the worst possible corporate give-aways under Bush-Cheney, it is incredible that just one year under Obama has produced a climate where the public now perceives the Democrats as the party that is cozy with Wall Street and doing nothing to help the middle class. (In fairness, the Democratic leadership in the Senate shares blame for this travesty, for their utter failure to establish a strong middle-class policy priority in the Senate.)
On health care Obama has shown no leadership on any of the progressive policies he appeared to support in his campaign. He and the Democratic Congressional leaders have completely botched the handling of this legislation. First, he continued to pursue a tactic of giving ground in hopes of achieving bipartisan support long after it was utterly apparent that the Republicans were unified in their determination to torpedo any legislation at all, in an effort to make health care into Obama’s "Waterloo". As always, he and the Democrats got no credit whatsoever from either the press or the public for this noble effort to be "bipartisan". Rather, they (correctly) were perceived as weak. The weakness and inaction persisted as the White House continued to signal tacit approval while a few despicable conservative Democrats in the Senate insisted upon dropping the few remaining progressive components of the legislation.
The end result is a bill that will be an albatross around the necks of Democrats. It will be rightly criticized as a heavy-handed federal mandate for average Americans of modest means to buy a lousy product from the private insurance industry cartel - - with no ‘public option’ - - and paid for by taxing middle class Americans who are lucky enough to have decent health insurance coverage now. ("Cadillac" insurance coverage indeed. Do they think we are idiots?) During the campaign, Obama correctly opposed McCain’s proposal to tax insurance plans to pay for health reform, & pledged many times to not raise taxes on the middle class. Does he or his "brilliant political team" not realize that he and the Democrats will be beaten over the head with this new "tax" on the middle class in the next election? WTF!!!!
To this sweeping list of abandonment of core Democratic policy positions must be added an equally astonishing list of failures to take corrective action to remedy Bush-Cheney legal and ethical abuses. Nothing at all has been done to prosecute, or even investigate, the litany of "national security" related abuses, such as torture, illegal surveillance, electronic eves-dropping, and the like. The Obama Justice Department has even sided with these perpetrators in several legal proceedings. The most corrupt administration in history (Bush-Cheney) has been given a complete ‘pass’ on all their legal and ethical violations.
Speaking of the Justice Department, perhaps the most egregious failure of action of all - - because it would have been so simple to implement and so easily defensible - - has been the utter failure to replace the Bush-Cheney appointed U.S. Attorneys around the nation. Even in "normal" times, the routine practice upon a change of parties in the White House has been to request the resignation of all of the previous administration’s appointees. Given the well-publicized corruption of the Bush-Cheney Administration in their appointment of politically biased U.S. Attorneys, the call for their resignation and replacement should have been a priority action on Day One of the Obama Administration. Instead, astonishingly, nearly all of the Bush-Cheney appointed U.S. Attorneys are still in place, and still harassing Democrats and advancing Republican interests all around the nation.
In sum, this abandonment of core Democratic party goals and policies, and utter failure to defend Democratic interests, leads one to ask: what is going on here?
Is this simply bad political judgment? For example, have they simply not learned the lesson that Democrats get no credit whatsoever, from either the press or the public, for trying to be "bipartisan". The current Republican Congress is without question the most lock-step, ruthlessly partisan political party in history, and yet, thanks to Democratic ineptness, the Republicans are nevertheless gaining in the polls.
Or is there something more sinister at work?
In an election where the U.S. was poised for a revolutionary sea-change in both foreign policy and domestic economic policy, the ruling corporate interests and their Republican Party lackeys must have been terrified. It was obvious from the political dynamic in 2008 that the next president was going to be a Democrat. So what was desperately needed from the ruling class perspective was a candidate who could appear populist, but at the end of the day pose no threat to those corporate interests. They needed a one-term "placeholder" Democratic president, who could return the resurgent Democratic base to its more typical state of discouragement and apathy by the next election, thereby assuring the re-establishment of Republican control in 2012.
Is Barrack Obama that secret Republican "sleeper cell" candidate, brought forth to blunt and ultimately dissolve the momentum for true change that was boiling over in 2008?
Or is the current Obama Administration just suffering from the most inept political tactics in half a century?
Let’s hear from you on this subject. Is this administration composed of closet corporatist Republicans or political bumblers. You decide.
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diarist note: this is a mirror diary, there is another answer added in the new poll, are they possibly just pulling the mainstream democratic party line?
as an accent to the diary, and the real issue it describes, mainly the collapse of the middle class in america, I reference todays storyline:
Nearly Half of U.S. Households Escape Federal Tax
About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.
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addendum: the reason the middle class tax cuts was necessary was because of the collapse of the middle class wage base that was, unfortunately, supported in apoligentsia by the mainstream Democratic Party corporatist line.
past wages (median)
present wages (median)
what about future wages?
U.S. Wage Growth: The Downward Spiral
February 5, 2010
Wage Increases Expected to Stay Low
Average hourly earnings for all private-sector workers are up 2% over the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Large employers are expected to raise employee base salaries by a mere 2.5% this year, according to Hewitt Associates (HEW), the human resources consulting firm. That would be the second-lowest wage increase on record, with last year's 1.8% gain as the smallest ever. And to keep fixed costs down, companies are embracing variable pay plans, annual lump-sum bonus payments that don't get added to base salary. Some 90% of U.S. corporations have put in place a broad-based variable pay plan for everyone below the executive level, compared with less than 50% in the early 1990s.