In my last blog post, I argued for the importance of having a serious progressive independent candidate in the 2012 presidential race. Now, allow me to be more specific. I hereby nominate Robert Reich for the office of President of the United States.
Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and chairman of Common Cause, a non-profit lobbying and advocacy organization dedicated to campaign finance reform and ethics in government. He has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Clinton, the latter as Secretary of Labor. In 2002, he ran for governor of Massachusetts and, despite having very little funding, still managed to come in a close second out of six candidates in the Democratic primary with 25% of the vote. Reich has published thirteen books, including Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle For America, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life, and Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. In these books, and in a recent series of short videos distributed by MoveOn.org, Reich demonstrates not only a mastery of his subject but a near uncanny ability to explain the most complex issues in terms even the most limited attention spans can grasp.
Reich is exactly what America needs. He’s a committed liberal—not for doctrinaire reasons, but because he’s carefully researched and analyzed the significant problems facing our country and has found the solutions that benefit the most Americans are progressive ones. His analysis of how our economy has collapsed and why we’re having so much difficulty reigniting it is thorough, incisive, and, quite frequently, brilliant. He understands exactly where our country went off the tracks and how to get it back on. And he’s somehow capable of explaining these highly complex issues in such a way that they’re comprehensible to absolutely anyone. (I suspect Reich could successfully explain the finer points of buying credit default swaps on negative-amortizing subprime mortgage derivatives to a herring.)
But could Reich, or any other independent candidate, actually win? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Certainly conventional wisdom has it that a third-party candidate can’t win the White House. But not so long ago conventional wisdom had it that an African-American could never win the White House, at least not in our lifetimes. Clearly, sometimes conventional wisdom is simply wrong.
Besides, we’re at a unique point in our nation’s history. President Obama enters the race saddled with a persistent 16% real unemployment rate. No president has been reelected with such a high rate of joblessness since World War II. According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, Obama’s disapproval rating has reaching an all-time high of 49%. And it’s nearly matched by current Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich’s disapproval rating of 48%. It seems certain that no mainstream candidate, Democrat or Republican, is going to generate much enthusiasm from voters over the next ten months.
And never has resentment of the two major parties and their corporate backers been stronger. One of the reasons the Republicans have been so much more confident and sure-footed than the Democrats over the past thirty years is that Republicans are consistent—they accept huge corporate contributions and, in turn, they protect the interests of their corporate masters. No conflict there. Democrats, on the other hand, have seemed uncertain and adrift over the past few decades, in large part because they’re incongruent—trying to protect the American worker (or at least paying lip service to so doing) while simultaneously sucking at the corporate teat. As the Washington Post recently reported, Obama and the Democratic National Committee have already accepted more campaign contributions from Wall Street banks than all the Republican candidates combined—more than $15.6 million. And the awareness of the political influence that such money brings to politics has never been stronger. If there was ever a time when an independent candidate—someone who doesn’t accept corporate contributions, someone who isn’t beholden to corporate interests—could break the two-party system’s monopoly on power, it’s now.
But suppose conventional wisdom is right. Suppose no third-party candidate, including Robert Reich, could win the White House. Would a Reich campaign still be good for America? Yes, for two important reasons.
First, Democrats are in the habit of taking the liberal vote for granted. They know progressives aren’t going to vote Republican, so the party doesn’t have to do anything to attract them. For far too many years, the Democratic slogan seems to have been, “Vote for us because, heck, at least we’re not those bozos.” All Democrats have had to do to keep the progressive vote is to stay two degrees to the left of Republicans. But staying two degrees to the left of Newt Gingrich simply isn’t going to cut it anymore, not given the severity of the problems our country’s currently facing.
The prospect of a Reich campaign scares the hell out of Democrats because his presence in the race would threaten to split the liberal vote, potentially losing Obama the election—just as some claim Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000. (Of course, Gore actually won that election; he just didn’t take office. But that’s another story.) And that’s good. We need the Democrats to be scared. It’s precisely that fear what will force the party to shift left in order to avoid losing the progressive vote.
Put another way, in his first term Obama has consistently embraced the political center. But as the Republicans swing further and further to the right, that political center shifts right as well. The presence of a Reich campaign would change the debate, shifting the national conversation to the left. In order to stay centrist, Obama would be forced to lean left to accommodate it.
Which brings us to the second important reason for a Reich campaign. With no challengers on the left, conservatives are going to dominate the news and the national conversation for the next ten months. That’s right, we’re in for ten long months of absurd “trickle down” tax reform proposals, attacks on social programs, immigrants, and the poor, and jingoistic chest thumping. And the media will be obliged to cover each of these ideas because, after all, the Republican race will be the only game in town. As Reich himself put it in a recent blog post, “there’s no primary contest in the Democratic party. So Republicans automatically get loads of free broadcast time to air their regressive nonsense while the Democrats get none.” Exactly. Unless, that is, Reich himself were to step into the fray, thereby redefining the debate and shifting the national conversation.
And if Reich were to stay focused on the issues rather than making any direct attacks against the president, it would give him the option of dropping out of the race and throwing his support to Obama any time he chooses. In the meantime, the campaign would still have given him a platform to explain to the American people the real reasons for our current economic crisis—and how we can resolve it. In other words, Reich doesn’t actually have to win in order for his campaign to be a success.
In another recent blog post, Reich predicts that, given how uninspiring the current crop of candidates are, we may be in store for a tepid presidential campaign. And he concludes, “a passionless presidential race may be dangerous for America. The nation’s problems may not wait. They require bold action, and soon.”
Once again, Professor Reich is correct. If you agree, please sign the petition and forward to others.
Robert Reich for President 2012