Stupid Salon comment system says "link your account". I click sign in, I click on Google, I pick a Google account, it then e-chews it awhile, then it shows me as signed in.
Then the Salon comment box tells me I have to be linked to a social account for it to work.
Life is too short, so I'm putting it here. Here is Stoller's defense of his original piece
My comment:
Is "believe that Obama is a progressive and vote for him", and "believe that Obama is not a progressive and vote against him" a valid dichotomy?
Certainly Obama has not taken the actions required to substantially ameliorate climate change as it occurs. However, his administration has taken substantial steps both in terms of renewable sustainable energy and in terms of development of sustainable transport infrastructure that are of use to a real policy to address climate change, and quite clearly the wing of the corporate party behind Mitt Romney is adamantly opposed to even doing that much.
And your argument does not spell out WHY we should HOPE FOR a repetition of the Bush administration in terms of the policies that will be pursued but believe that UNLIKE the first time we went through it, the progressive opposition to those policies will refrain from alliance with the intra-corporate party opposition and so avoid being coopted.
The pressures will be the same. "Join us and push back the Romney administration, or got it alone and lose!" The scapegoating of "lefty purists" for the election of the Romney administration (as Bush and Nader in Florida, even though a majority of Florida voters in fact voted for Gore) will be the same. I think its better than even odds that the result will be the same.
Meanwhile, if Obama is re-elected, we have four years to make the case against the Obama administration, FREE of the charge that we are just throwing the re-election campaign to "Republican X", because Obama cannot run for re-election.
Also, as a side-note: the Obama campaign in 2008 supported existing corporate trade agreements. Anybody who believed that the "renegotiate" was anything but an empty promise if an admittedly pro-corporate trade agreement administration was doing the negotiating was a co-author of that fiction. Supporters of candidates with progressive positions argued at the time that it was a quite evidently empty promise. Pretending that there was an actual progressive promise being made there in order to pad out the list of broken promises is not terribly persuasive.