President Obama may deserve a second term. We, the confused and misguided masses may not. American political pundits often say that the American people deserve a more high-minded debate and steadfast political leadership. President Obama has given us this. We the people have not accepted it. In politics and government countries often get not the leaders they should but the leaders they deserve. In no better person is our nationally fractured personality better represented than in Mitt Romney. When a culture and people lose the virtues and character that once made them great, the societal decay will start to show in the face of the person that country selects to lead it. However, these men not only reflect their party’s dominance of the public’s mood at any given time but also the spirit of the times and the moneyed interests behind them.
The Promise Keeper
There is no question that the majority of the Republican Party views President Obama as “the other”, an alien intruder who has somehow conned his way into the Executive Branch. And in a way, they’re right. His presence is alien in that he has been something that modern politics has moved away from, a promise keeper. Not in the 90s Christian fundamentalist sense, but in a sense that he has done things in office that he actually said he would do when he was running for that office. President Obama promised to dismantle Al Qaida and kill Bin Laden. Over the first two years of the Obama Administration there were more drone strikes in the Afghanistan/ Pakistan tribal regions than there were in the entire Bush presidency. The drone program, as controversial as it is, has resulted in the almost total destruction of Al Qaida in that region, most recently with the death of Al Qaida’s “General Manager”, Abu Yahya Al-Libi. Just after coming into office President Obama charged CIA Director Leon Panetta with finding Bin Laden. Less than two years later Bin Laden was dead. This happened four years after his last taped address and six years after President Bush shut down the special task force he designated to locate Bin Laden. Later in 2011, President Obama ordered the karmically justified yet possibly unconstitutional killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a Yemeni imam and American citizen with ties to terrorist attacks and attempted attacks. Also in 2011, President Obama initiated the United Nations strike on Libya that resulted in the death of the war criminal Moammar Gadhafi. It was an American drone that hit Gadhafi’s convoy, allowing rebels to capture and kill him, helping along the burgeoning “Arab Spring.” These successful killings along with the NEW START Treaty with Russia have been described by many as President Obama’s greatest foreign policy accomplishments.
As president, for good or ill politically, he passed the market based and deficit neutral Affordable Care Act, building the framework for every American to be able to purchase the same health coverage as their members of Congress. Obama bailed out the automakers in Detroit and restructured the companies, in the process saving millions of Midwest jobs attached to the industry. While the rest of the country calls it the “Auto Bailout” the citizens of Michigan call it “The Rescue.” Today Detroit is thriving. Obama passed the Recovery Act at the height of the Recession and stopped the heavy bleeding of jobs. Though it contained 40% tax cuts and much needed (though not enough) infrastructure spending, the area where it did the most good was in the area of helping states to augment their budgets, thus delaying and or stopping the flow of crippling layoffs. Obama’s stimulus, bailout of Detroit, and his management of the second half of TARP effectively saved the American economy from plunging into another Great Depression that might have destroyed our modern way of life. Though he has failed to pass comprehensive climate change legislation and sustainable energy legislation, inside of the stimulus was $30 billion of seed money for research and development of a more energy sustainable future. He also signed into law financial regulations that, though are not strong enough, are the most stringent rules placed on Wall Street since FDR. He pushed for the repeal of DADT and has voiced his support for marriage equality. He has defended women’s health in the face of an unprecedented Republican onslaught. He has appointed two women, one of whom is a Latina, to the Supreme Court. He has pushed for a more liberalized immigration policy through the Dream Act while enforcing the current laws and deporting criminals. He increased troop levels and stabilized the security situation in Afghanistan, just as he said he would during the campaign. He ended the War in Iraq. Many of the presidents conservative opponents like to point out that the Iraq withdrawal was part of the Status of Forces Agreement made under the last administration. This is true, except it leaves out the part from the summer of 2008 when the Bush Administration was pushing for a longer drawdown time. From the campaign trail, then-candidate Obama pressured the negotiations into a shorter time table until Prime Minster Al-Maliki agreed with Senator’s Obama’s timeframe. The Obama administration also abandoned a longer timetable for withdrawal.
He has also done many things that liberals find unforgivable, abhorrent and disastrous. He has failed to even attempt another assault weapons ban even after the massacres in Tucson and Aurora. He extended the Bush tax cuts as a deal for keeping in place his own middle class tax cuts. He has expanded the executive powers Bush used in the name of national security. The habeas corpus nightmare that is Guantanamo Bay is still open but mostly because of cowardly congressional reluctance. He has cracked down on medical marijuana more than any other former president. Finally, and most unforgivably, he has not investigated the war crimes committed by the Bush Administration, forever legitimizing their torture regime as a debatable policy prescription.
Obama has kept many of his promises and pushed for what he called “change” through an incremental and steady agenda of moderation and progress. One could make the argument that he has been a radical moderate in his policies and negotiations, even with the opposing political party that has trended toward madness, extremism, and violence. The “change” that has come about is not in government or politics; it is in the public’s ability to be able to register his stewardship and accomplishments. Some may blame this on President Obama’s inability to properly explain his vision to the public. His communication has been adequate but the public may just not be listening anymore. This coupled with the poor economic recovery has made a top tier and formidable candidate out of one of the most detached, lackluster and dishonest men to ever run for the presidency, Mitt Romney.
“On a gathering storm comes a tall, handsome man in a dusty black coat, with a Red Right Hand.”
The Shape Shifter
The story of Romney’s ascendance in his party and his relationship to it is an awkward one. It’s hard to believe a man is “severely conservative” when years before he pledged “I will preserve and protect a women’s right to choose” and advocated for government healthcare mandates before calling them unconstitutional. Since his appearance on the national stage, Romney’s lies, misrepresentations, and flip-flops have done nothing to ingratiate him to the conservative base. In the pursuit of his party’s nomination he has been rightly and repeatedly called a chameleon, shape shifter and empty suit. Newt Gingrich has said that Romney “has a near Pavlovian reflex of lapsing into falsehoods in order to rearrange reality to his liking”. He was perhaps perfectly identified by Democratic Congressman Barney Frank as, “a man totally devoid of any commitment to any principle except his own advancement.” Frank continued, “I have never seen a major political figure so absolutely unburdened by any concept to any principle whatsoever”. The sheer speed of the free flowing lies emanating from the Romney presidential campaign has made them nearly impossible to catalogue and quantify. A few have tried. For the sake of time and tragic entertainment, let’s just take a look at some of most ridiculous.
During a primary debate Romney said that he “left politics, went into business”. This is correct if going into business is giving $60,000 speeches and running for president in 2008. During another debate Romney said that he hadn’t seen an ad run by his SuperPac attacking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. He then almost comically proceeded to name, point by point, the attack lines in the ad. When facing a near 20 point favorability gap with women, he tried to claim that 92% of the jobs lost during the recession belonged to women. Romney has claimed that our Navy is the smallest it’s been since 1917. This is hard to believe, considering that Obama has increased defense spending three times and the Navy he now presides over has more ships than even the final years of the Bush Administration. After the Washington Post published a story detailing a teenage Romney’s bullying of a gay schoolmate, he apologized for any events that occurred but said that he didn’t remember the incident in which he and fellow classmates held the boy and down and forcibly cut his hair. Everyone else involved in the incident remembers it. He has said that “President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.” He justified these comments by citing Obama’s criticism of Wall Street and Big Oil. He has said that Obama “promised he’d cut taxes for the middle income Americans. He hasn’t done that.” He has. A number of times. He mentioned that during his tenure as Massachusetts Governor he enjoyed “four years of budget surpluses”. He left a $1.3 billion deficit. Romney titled his 2008 op-ed “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” If this had occurred the way he had advocated for, without government intervention, the cost to America’s auto industry and the Midwest would have been incalculable. The bankruptcies would not only restructure the car companies themselves but they would have eviscerated the regional economy through parts manufacturers and dealers but also local businesses that service workers. Romney’s plan would have gutted the Rust Belt and decimated the economy of his home state. In May of 2012 Romney again argued for his preferred version of the way Detroit was bailed out saying, “So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.” When asked later about his comments suggesting that President Obama was comfortable living in a less than Christian nation based on his attendance to Reverend Wright’s church, Romney replied in his normal modis operandi, “I’ll stand by whatever I said, whatever it was.”He has said that “I didn’t get involved in politics early in my life.”He said this after he protested in favor of the war in Vietnam as a youth, campaigned for his father’s presidential run in 1968 and his mother’s Senate run in 1970, and after he ran against Teddy Kennedy in the 90s. His lies are not merely limited to the history of his political career they also extend to his own business background. Both Romney’s venture capital firm Bain Capital and his presidential campaign have claimed that he left the firm in 1999. However, it was later uncovered that he controlled the company for many more years after he claimed to have left. On top of being involved in deals that resulted in the outsourcing of American jobs to China, he was also involved in Bain’s investment in a company called Stericycle, a medical waste firm that, among other things, disposed of aborted fetuses. During the primaries, Romney said that “there are a lot of people who were saying that if you’re running for office you really can’t speak honestly to the American people. Well, we did.”
Through each stage of his political career, Romney has lied like a snake shedding its skin, each time changing his appearance to compliment whichever political race he was in. He has shown the incredible awkwardness of Nixon with the same shameless capacity to say things that simply are not true. If elected president Romney has displayed the potential to morph into a colossus of untruths and alternate realities that could dwarf even George W. Bush in their frequency and cynical depravity, further damaging our nation’s already damaged capacity to find its way forward.
“They’re whispering his name through this disappearing land but hidden in his coat is a red right hand.”
The Confused Masses
With a little more than half of the citizens actually voting in elections it’s left up to the approximately 5 to 10% of swing voters that will decide elections. The only thing more hilariously terrifying than what Americans don’t know is what they think they do. There no longer exists an objective universal truth among Americans but rather a subjective pick-your-favorite reality. Only in a nation as dysfunctional as ours could a man who campaigned on hope, change, unity and reconciliation, once elected, be transformed into a divisive and polarizing figure. A series of strange poll numbers over the last few years point to a not only confused American public but one that believes in dangerous fantasy.
• 70% of Americans don’t know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land.
• 38% can pass a Citizenship Test.
• 6% don’t know when Independence Day is.
• 63 % don’t know how many Justices are on the Supreme Court.
• 75% could name at least two of the seven dwarfs compared to 25% who could name two Supreme Court justices.
• 53% Don’t Know who the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is. 28% correctly named John Roberts. 8% said Thurgood Marshal, who died in 1993. 6% said John Paul Stevens. 4% said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
• 29% don’t know who the Vice President is.
• 20% believe President Obama is a Muslim. Only 34% believe he is a Christian.
• 20% believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
• 46% believe in Creationism.
• 53% of Republicans believe in Climate Change. 43% believe it is from natural causes, not man-made.
• 40% thought that the Affordable Care Act required “Death Panels”.
• 75% can name the Three Stooges compared to 40% who could identify the three branches of government.
• 40% think that teachers should be able lead prayers in school.
• 46% cannot name both Houses of Congress.
• 57% don’t know what an amendment is.
• 44% don’t know what the president’s cabinet does.
• 27% cannot name one war that was fought by the United States in the 1800s
• 39% want government to “stay out of Medicare” 15% were not sure if government should be involved in Medicare.
• 70% believe Iran already has nuclear weapons.
• In 2006, 50% believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In 2012, 63% of Republicans still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
• In June 2007, 41% believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11th attacks.
• In September 2009, 25% of democrats believed that the Bush Administration was involved in the September 11th attacks.
• 14% believe that President Obama may be the Antichrist. 24% of Republicans believe he is the Antichrist.
• In 2000, 14% of Democrats believed that Bush was the Antichrist.
• 37% of Republicans would prefer Charlie Sheen to be president over Obama.
• 30% don’t agree with theDeclaration of Independence.
• 25% think that the Affordable Care Act has already been repealed.
• 45% didn’t know about the Supreme Court’s health care ruling.
These polls don’t bode well for the future of our citizenry, but the only thing worse is what they portend for public policy and some of the officials they elect. Through all of these disconcerting numbers Americans have consistently shown their inability to understand and decipher complex issues. They hated the bailouts but then thought that they were a good idea. They have lost faith with the direction of the war in Afghanistan, yet approve of Obama’s handling of it. They like the individual provisions in the president’s Affordable Care Act yet when it is identified as his and has $200 million of negative ads dropped on it, their support plummets. When the White House launched an outreach program of petitions and questions called “We The People,” a large portion of the initial questions were concerned with marijuana and aliens. Even onto the final days before the Supreme Court ruled the ACA to be constitutional, the public still had mixed feelings about it. In the fall of 2011, at the height of the Occupy Movement, 50% of Americans didn’t know what it was. Texas federal inmate Keith Judd won 47% of the 2012 West Virginia democratic primary against President Obama. David Lansford was twice elected mayor of Clovis, New Mexico, the second time with 63% of the vote, even after claiming that President Obama was involved in a CIA conspiracy and was the “carnal manifestation of evil.” In California, of all places, Birther and Minuteman militia lawyer Gary Kreep won his election to become a Judge on the San Diego County Superior Court. The frantic “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz lost in her Republican primary race to challenge Dianna Feinstein, but not before getting 113,000 votes. White House party crasher and reality TV star Tareq Salahi was polled at 19% in the Virginia Gubernatorial election. Not all of this can be blamed on themost-watched, yet least informative, Fox News. That haunting question then begins to take shape: Are a people with a seeming inability to clearly reason and almost innate sense of ignorant fantasy, able to govern themselves? And do they, through their own obliviousness and cavalier apathy, unintentionally turn their country over to be ruled by a smaller and smaller pack of powerful masters? As scary as some of these polls and votes may be, the majority of everyday polls are quite normal but still register a lack of understanding of modern politics. But every once in a while, a poll will find that the public is a bit more forward leaning on issues like marijuana legalization, deep defense spending cuts, income inequality and taxing the rich, and gay marriage. However, these attitudes can be changed, influenced and corrupted by the most destructive force in the world: naked capitalism. In this election, personified by the billionaires lining up behind Mitt Romney.
“A shadow is cast wherever he stands, stacks of green paper in his red right hand.”
The Puppet Masters
On May 29, Mitt Romney won the Texas primary, earning enough delegates to clinch the official nomination of the loose pack of barbarians, billionaires and bigots that calls itself the Republican Party. He didn’t give a rousing speech at a college stadium in front of thousands of screaming grassroots supporters. He was in Las Vegas at a fundraiser with the vicious, race baiting Donald Trump. He didn’t work a rope line of cheering volunteers hoping to touch the future president. He was raising money with Newt Gingrich and meeting with casino billionaire magnate Sheldon Adelson. What made history that Tuesday was not simply the fact that the man who could be the country’s next president won his party’s nomination, but that he had spent the day with his party’s biggest public campaign contributor and the country’s biggest public buffoon. Though the story that permeated the media was that of Trump’s depraved bombast and Romney’s proximity to it, the real issue underneath it all was the billionaire puppet masters behind the conservative war on Obama, the just-ended Republican primaries, and the Romney candidacy itself.
Since its 2010 decision, Citizens United has opened an unlimited reservoir of “dark money” to newly formed advocacy groups and SuperPacs which have forever altered the Republican primary process, and by this November threaten to warp our general election into an infinite funhouse mirror maze that only the 1 % can play in. Since the decision, designed and controlled by Chief Justice John Roberts, a spider web of non-rules now only loosely govern American campaign finance with “issue ads” from “social welfare” and “primary purpose” groups now run advocating for or specifically opposing candidates. It has also introduced to the American public, or at least the few who are paying attention, to a collection of millionaire and billionaire superdonors who have nothing resembling a relationship with the general public and even less with the democratic process itself.
There are the big oil billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who not only covertly helped to build the Tea Party into a media Frankenstein, and whose media think-tank and SuperPac substructure of misinformation has been dubbed the “Kochtopuss” by liberal activists, and who have pledged and raised tens of millions of dollars to defeat Obama in what they have called the “mother of all wars.” Koch Industries is the 2nd biggest privately held company in the US, and it’s run by libertarian anarchists determined to raise $400 million in 2012. They are essentially turning themselves into a two-man attack arm oftheir own amorphous political party. These men have been such a big part of the Republican fundraising apparatus for so long and are worth so much that it’s hard to separate their economic and government philosophy from the main pillars of the Republican Party. Sheldon Adelson gave $20 million to Newt Gingrich’s SuperPac, Winning Our Future, further muddying the primary waters. Since Gingrich dropped out of the race, Sheldon Adelson has further cemented his position this election cycle as the biggest public Republican super-donor by giving Romney’s “Restore Our Future” $10 million and has promised “limitless” funds to unseat Obama. But because anonymous “dark money” contributions are allowable under the new rules, we may never know who the biggest donors were. A $5 million injection can help a flailing candidate when they’re in a tight spot in the primaries but there was one SuperPac that towered over the rest: Romney’s “Restore Our Future”.
Restore Our Future was founded by former Romney aides from his 2008 presidential campaign, and has raised tens of millions of dollars thanks to a small assortment of wall street executives, polluters, oil tycoons, and vulture capitalists all standing to greatly benefit and be further enriched by Romney and Paul Ryan’s plans for deficit creating tax cuts and privatization schemes for public services. Together they assemble a rogues galleryof decadent wealth, historical greed and gross hubris. They are already quite accomplished at buying the primaries, and are headed full-bore toward the general election:
• William “The Other Brother” Koch, whose net worth is $2 billion, has already has already given $2 million to Romney’s SuperPac and owns a wine collection of 40,00 bottles worth $12 million.
• Harold Simmons, billionaire toxic chemical industrialist, has given $17 million. Is the biggest Republican contributor 2nd only to Sheldon Adelson. He owns among other things a $4 million mansion on a private lake, surrounded by 17,000 tulips
• Julian Robertson Jr., hedge fund giant, called his $1.25 million contribution to Restore Our Futureas “one of the most important investments I’ve ever made.”
• Robert Mercer, stock speculator, gave $1 million to Restore Our Future. He also contributed to efforts to stop the “Ground Zero Mosque”. He also owns a $2 million model railroad set.
• Bob Perry, McMansion builder, whose half billion dollar fortune helped to finance the Swift Boat attack ads against John Kerry in 2004 has given $7 million to
Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and $4 million to Restore Our Future.
In the 2010 midterm elections outside conservative groups spent $304 million, resulting in the biggest congressional gains for Republicans since the backlash to FDR. Environmental groups and Unions have raised and spent so little in comparison to their conservative counterparts that it’s almost not even worth analyzing. Bill Maher gave $1 million to Priorities USA the most closely aligned Obama SuperPac, but his and the liberal SuperPac donations overall have been grossly outweighed by the money pouring is from the right. Priorities USA’s best fundraising month was May 2012, when they raised a mere$4 million. Sixty percent of the $123 million raised so far by Rove’s American Crossroad and Crossroads GPS has been from private donors whose identities and motivations we will never know.
Though the Citizen’s United ruling forbids SuperPacs from directly coordinating with candidates that hasn’t seemed to have stopped them. Oklahoma oil billionaire Harold Hamm became an energy adviser to the Romney campaign in March 2012 and within a few months he had donated nearly $1 million to Restore Our Future. Ed Gillespie, who along with Karl Rove was a founding member of American Crossroads and is going to spend well over $100 million to unseat Obama, was announced in April as a new senior adviser to the Romney campaign. Former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, a senior policy adviser to Romney is also head of the Republican SuperPac, American Action Network. Romney claimed that he wasn’t coordinating with the SuperPac supporting him while at the same time he was raising money for it. It seems to strain credulity that in just these few instances there is not just a small amount of coordination but an overt violation of the already lax rules of the Citizens United decision.
All of these anonymous and billionaire donors aren’t really contributing to the political conversation so much as they are pushing lies and rhetorically shouting down the opposition with crushing negative ad buys. This, coupled with the unprecedented and coordinated voter purge going on in Republican controlled swing states, reveals the true intention of the 2012 Republican campaign effort: Obama’s defeat through the disenfranchisement and disillusion of what were formerly enthusiastic voters.
• 29 % of American say they are less likely to vote because big donors to SuperPacs have too much influence over elected officials.
• 60% say they trust government less because big donors to SuperPacs have too much influence.
• 77% say that members of Congress are more likely to act in the interest of the SuperPac donors.
Obama is now, even more than in 2008 is dependent on small donors whose maximum donation doesn’t exceed $200 and the majority of the public doesn’t even know what SuperPacs are. Because of his domestic policies on health care reform, a more fair tax structure, the slightest of regulation of an out of control Wall Street, and added protections that might benefit the less fortunate, Wall Street and the corporate establishment have turned on him. Corporate profits are at an all-time high at the same moment that the private sector is refusing to add jobs. And now with the SuperPacs’ creation, and the Supreme Court’s recent decision to expand limitless funding into state and local races, the power elite are hoping to turn the citizens of this country against a president who has fought for them even when they thought he was a Muslim, even when they didn’t understand or agree with his policies.
“You’re a microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan, designed and directed by his red right hand.” – Nick Cave
The Choice
The President is a flawed and sometimes hypocritical man. But he has kept many of the campaign promises he made. He has been a bulwark against those who would seek to fully subjugate us, billionaires whose sole purpose in life is absolute economic power over the confused masses, whose methods again and again have consisted of candidates who sling the most shameless of lies. More than $3 billion is expected to be raised and spent in this election through the candidate’s campaigns, SuperPacs, and on congressional and senate races, all resulting in Obama being the first incumbent president of the modern era to be outspent. Romney has now outraised Obama for three straight months and pulled in over $100 million in August. As has been proven in the past, the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed. Romney is their Trojan horse, sent to finish the job that George W. Bush was too inept to do. Romney is not a moderate or even a “severe conservative.” It’s unclear what Romney is other than a sentinel programmed by greed and self-interest, and sent by billionaires with the sole purpose of stopping Obama and gutting programs like HUD, Education, Medicare, and Planned Parenthood. And to, of course, nominate Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement. A Romney presidency would push our country so far into the past that it would be unrecognizable. Romney isn’t meant to be another Reagan or Clinton. His is merely meant to stop Obama and be a one-term, zero-sum kamikaze pilot for the 1%. That is Romney’s primary function. As was shown in the gruesome Republican primaries, his only strength is electability. He’s a fortunate son with no vision or plan for government. His only mission is to stop Obama and squirm into office with 50.1 % of the vote. The conservative effort and Romney candidacy are not interested in some grand conservative resurgence or agenda. They have no agenda. Their aim is the destruction of the progressive movement through the ruin of the Obama administration, and once elected president , the chameleon will start to take on the dark red hue of his colleagues in Congress. They have already stated their desire to repeal the ACA through budget reconciliation. Obama's legacy and success (or failure) is now completely intertwined with the overall progressive movement. As we become a majority/minority country, the future demographics are not with Republicans. Their only hope for political survival is to hold off the tide of the multicultural, more democratic, and certainly more liberal future that Obama represents. What is up for grabs is the very future of the modern American life that we have enjoyed for the last 50 years. The cadre of billionaires and millionaires waging war on Obama and contributing to the Romney effort share Romney’s contempt for the middle class. It’s not spoken and may not even be a conscious effort, but it’s embedded deep in the American conservative character; it’s a hatred for people who have developed a life that may have values that might be based more on fairness and skew toward justice. It’s not that all of the 1% is conservative; just the most politically active of the 1%. It’s not that they hate socialism and tyranny. Socialism in the form of bailouts, and tyranny in the form of their power over Congress have worked out great for them. It’s that they don’t want to contribute to the betterment of lives not born with the same privilege as theirs. An extra 2% paid in taxes is not socialism or class warfare. It’s not even liberal. Theirs is a proxy class war waged through ads that can change the minds of an impressionable public that doesn’t share their views of “Social Darwinism.”
Some may see this election as an Alien vs. Predator scenario when no matter who wins, the American people lose. This is false. Election results matter. Politics isn't entertainment. It isn't professional wrestling for the thinking-class. The personalities that inhabit the presidency matter. In this election we are presented with two clear paths. Though whoever wins, there will no doubt be some entitlement trimming. One path will ensure moderate, deliberate, incremental progress toward a more equal and just society, while another will lead to a past where no holds were barred and the powerful ruled over the weak with severe austerity and fascism.
During his 8-plus-hour speech against the 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts, Senator Bernie Sanders said this:
“There is no doubt in my mind what many of, not all, but many of my Republican colleagues want to do. And that is they want to move this country back into the 1920s when essentially we had an economic and political system which was controlled by big money interests; where working people and the middle class had no programs to sustain them when things got bad, when they got old, and when they got sick; when labor unions were very hard to come by because of anti-worker legislation. And that’s what they want. They don’t believe in things like the Environmental Protection Agency. They don’t believe in things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid federal aid to education. And that is the fight that we will be waging.”
This is their goal. A modern Republican America no longer hindered by entitlement programs, regulations, progressive taxes, voter’s rights, women’s rights or Civil Rights of any kind. This may be our final election before we permanently solidify our new plutocracy. With half of Congress being millionaires who stand to gain from their own legislation, this election will only move the ruling class closer to their permanent domination. The Democrats running in the 2016 primaries will no doubt have their own SuperPacs with their own colorful assortment of super-donors. SuperPacs and billionaires can buy our elections, and thus our democracy, but their efforts wouldn’t matter if we weren’t willing to sell it to them. Just because they have the power to pollute our airwaves with their ads doesn’t mean we have to listen. The SuperPacs are effective only if we cede our opinion, and in so doing, part of our freedom over to them. Sometimes money can’t buy an election from an often uninformed and possibly delusional but still essentially fair-minded public. Sometimes the public wakes up. In 2010, in a heavily Republican year, Jerry Brown won California’s governorship, running against Meg Whitman who outspent him by $140 million. In the June 2012 Wisconsin recall election, with Democrats outspent 30 million to 3 million, John Lehman defeated Republican State Senator Van Wanggaard handing control of the State’s Senate back over to the Democrats. Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown is being outspent 8 to 1 by Republicans but still maintains a 10 point lead over his challenger.
This country is in dire need of a transformational positive presidency that actually empowers the people, not just the rich. Obama was never a populist. He was always a center left technocrat. But the unprecedented billionaire assault on his presidency and the change in our national conversation brought on by the Occupy Movement may turn him into a populist yet. Whoever wins in November will preside over the inevitable recovery and will get the historical credit for it and their brand of politics may rule the country for a generation or more. Elections are not always just about the candidates. They are about the character, spirit and attitude we choose to face the world with. 2012 will not be the year that the weakened Obama, ravaged by crippling unemployment, fought off Romney and the conservative onslaught. Just as it will not be the year in which Romney defeated the once messianic Obama. It will be the year where the nation was finally sold on the long con of self-inflicted downward mobility or the year when citizens once again reached through their confusion and a haze of lies and kept their hands on the tenuous controls of their country. At least for another four years