As a progressive, what has really come home to me since the election of Barack Obama is how many enemies we have. Yes, of course the Reactionary Right, the GOP Party of No is an implacable foe; we expected that, after all. What we did not expect was how many Democrats would block progress and derail reform.
And I'm not talking about just the Blue Dog "barely Democrats" like Lincoln & Nelson, et al. I'm talking about the leaders of our party, the behind the scenes movers and shakers who we trust to guide our party and to set up strategies to help us get our agenda through. There have been times in the past year that I wondered if some Republican were actually calling the shots behind the scenes for the Dems; the way they have managed to marginalize a party that just won a huge victory looks at times like willful sabotage.
I saw on the news that people were demonstrating in Washington FOR health care yesterday. Astonishing. Not that they were demonstrating, but that there were very few demonstrations in support of health care at all during this entire time. The tea party and the insurance companies' surrogates like Dick Armey's folks sure weren't sleeping all this time. They were out there in the streets, making their lies and propaganda known, and they succeeded. They absolutely completely whipped our ass, and the blane can only be put on Democratic Party leadership. They allowed the Right Wing to demonize health care to the point that the GOP can now point to numerous polls showing the American people are against it. Well, of course they are. A good portion of those people believe that their grandmothers will be euthanized and other lies of that sort. And these people saw demonstrators on TV night after night in August of last year, railing against health care, while they saw nobody demonstrating in support of it. We wanted single payer, then we wanted a public option, right? But we didn't do anything to make those things happen. we sat on our hands and blogged and signed all those e-mail petitions while the Right Wing was busy wearing out their shoe leather, marching and rallying in support of what THEY wanted.
Where were our Democratic leaders? Why did they not call for people to get out there and demonstrate? Well, a lot of them are getting campaign contributions from the unions. And a lot of them are the Democratic equivalent of RINOS. They are DINOS, Democrats in name only. Look at what is going on right now on Financial reform. In the aftermath of the Greatest Robbery of all Time, the great Wall Street/Banking fiasco that led to the recession, the Democrats are finding that they lack the votes to pass any meaningful reforms to prevent this type of outrage from happening again. Lacking the Democratic votes, not the Republican votes. We know that the GOP will be against any reform whatsoever; that goes without saying. But the fact that there are Democratic Senators unwilling to reform the system that allowed wholesale theft of billions of dollars tells you everything you need to know about the Democratic Party: that many of them are as much bought and paid for as the GOP.
Any true progressive (I actually prefer the term liberal; why be ashamed of the L word?) has to be extremely disillusioned and disappointed by all this. They all have let us down, from the President, to the members of Congress, to the behind the scenes Democratic party leaders and strategists who failed to mobilize the people and get them out in the streets in support of our policies. Never in my 53 years have seen a party that was on top by so much squander their position so quickly, to the point where they now act like they are the minority party. Will they rebound? Who knows? Perhaps the Senators who are pushing for a Public Option in reconciliation will prevail, and the Democrats will come out of this like champs. I am hoping for that. If you had told me on Inauguration Day that 13 months from then I would be praying for a miracle like that to get health care reform passed, I would have said you were crazy. But that's exactly where us progressives are these days, and we can thank our Democratic party "friends" for that.