Last night the President gave a very effective speech--and I mean that he delivered something beyond the usual honed oratory. He took pains, it seemed, to remain straightforward, to avoid the rhetoric that many are now wary of. I'll bet he gets at least a 4-5 point poll bump, and that the bump has initial staying power.
The speech might help revive Mr. Obama's drooping fortunes and--more important--our hopes for real accomplishments from the Dems in coming months. Those fortunes were not quite on life-support--the Republicans are so malign, so disorganized, and so racist that I have insisted for months there was no way Obama could lose in '12, however he disappointed. (Lately that assessment seemed just a mite premature.)
The speech included more progressive measures than I expected. It chastised Congress for its failure to act, but I hope it signals a greater willingness on Obama's part to LEAD. I will hope against hope that it means we get something closer to real health care, though I saw no real evidence of this (of much more than his desire to get a deal) in the speech.
I will be very grateful for an end to DADT, if it should come. My dad was gay, and went through hell while in the Central Intelligence Corps in Germany (then an Army outfit) after the war. It's personal to me.
The devil is ALWAYS in the details, but the speech suggests that Obama has not lost his political instincts, and that the political winds--should they blow angry enough--can push him in a more progressive direction. (You certainly wondered after Massachusetts and his offers to water HCR down further.)
Mr. Obama again made the case for bipartisanship, which has alarmed many of us who see politics in the current period as genuine struggle, the Republicans as determined enemies. But our hopes for reform in several areas look brighter today than yesterday.
BUT with expectations quite diminished--maybe in a healthy way--what I want to know from here on out is whether the President is helping POOR PEOPLE, among whom I would now count much of the American middle class. As he stood in that 98% white chamber with its 93% men, most of them millionaires (many clearly up past bedtime), that was what was really on my mind.
There is plenty we now know that Obama is NOT going to do. He's not going to challenge the military industrial complex. Ending DADT is easy compared to closing down 800-plus bases which we have used to police the world and spend endless fortunes to maintain. . . to arming dictators and lousy governments to keep our own factories going, Wall Street moguls and revolving-door generals in strip clubs and champagne.
The military industrial complex, a killing enterprise that is 50% of our economy, is always the elephant in the room, and Pres. Obama is feeding that elephant. We are at new record highs in military spending, spending more on it in the midst of a people's (not corporate) depression than all other countries combined, more in several hours than Al Qaeda spends in a year, as the Center for Defense Information points out.
The US military is the world's biggest polluter and its biggest consumer of the oil it fights for. Mr. Obama is never going to speak directly or honestly to this madness, we now know that.
Nor--though he will scold--does the President plan to challenge the over-arching control of our lives (of which the recent SCOTUS decision is but part and parcel) by the giant corporations that are wringing out the last few dollars from America's poor and middle class people as we speak. Corporations, we should add, with NO loyalty to the needs of American citizens.
As he signaled again, the President is for nuclear energy, for offshore drilling. He is for "school reforms" that are killing public education here in Tallahassee, FL and in Red Bank, NJ (where my mom is on the school board) too. And he's still lecturing Africa about corruption--how patronizing, how colonialist, how tacky, especially after eight years of Wall Street bailouts, of Cheney/Bush. Does being a mixed-race, Harvard educated person who has visited Kenya REALLY give you that right? Who is the REAL audience for such speechifying?
Little word on Afghanistan, of course. Until we decide whether we're for or against the Taliban, I guess that is as it should be. (That this confusion leads to indiscriminate killing, further complicating the ill-defined task, should not surprise.) In bragging about the Al Qaeda members we've killed lately, the President failed to invoke the innocents we have murdered--doubled in his first year. Despite the fact that, for ONCE, I hoped we had a Dem secure in his manhood, he doubled the number of those drones when he entered office.
The spending freeze is also reprehensible, vague feint in the direction of an 'austerity' that is always set aside to fight wars, really just ANOTHER sop to Wall Street. The notion that 'if people are tightening their belts we must follow suit' is spurious. If in tightening its belt govt fails to HELP us. . . well, that's the Katrina way. At a time when there is such obvious crying need for help--with 2 in 5 kids going hungry and 100,000-plus (STILL) losing their homes a month--to announce a freeze on all but the military and Medicare is CRUEL.
So. . . yeah, I set my teeth against a lot of what Mr. Obama is doing--still--after last night.
But in pursuit of more clarity--apropos of the fighting that has taken place here--I'd like to make a proposal that we dedicate ourselves with more discernment to declaring what we DO believe and then seeing whether politicians live up to it. Because if we don't develop some agreement about what 'progressive' means, how can we ever decide what pols to get behind?
This might save any of us from vaguely thinking Hillary would have been better, when she sat on the board of Walmart (killed dozens of businesses in MY community, how about yours?), voted for war, prayed with CRAZY right-wing Republicans in the vile, vile "Fellowship"(http://harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525).
Instead of an endless back and forth about whether Obama is good, bad, or better with catsup, let's establish some simple benchmarks about what progressive means. I'd start with opposing war, the MIC, corporate personhood, derivative investment casinos and Wall Street's insistence on 15-20% annual returns, which has crushed poor people here and throughout the world for several decades. How about you?
For me the best way to frame this is to invoke the DLC. The Democratic Leadership Committee was formed to move the Dem party rightward. It was a reaction to New Left politics, a right-wing response to George McGovern's loss (he was an anti-war guy, too). Guys like Henry "Scoop" Jackson who started the DLC were fierce Cold Warriors, defenders of the contractors and military adventurism that fed the corporate machine.
The Clintons, Gore, and Lieberman ALL embraced the DLC when they came along, became its de facto leaders. Behind the whole notion of 'triangulation' that Clinton polished to an avaricious sheen lies the simple (to me evil) calculus: talk populist, collect corporate dollars.
When Obama got the nomination, some of us briefly rejoiced--it looked like the DLC might be finished. Hillary Clinton had received the support of most DLC members, to no one's surprise.
When Obama was ELECTED, though, he went to the DLC's Congressional arm, the New Democrat Coalition, and told them he was "one of them." He begged for their support.
This, for me, is the most telling moment of Obama's presidency. It is the fault line that connects Obama to someone like Lieberman (there's a reason he campaigned for him even after Joe left the party). And to the toxic and terrible Harold Ford, now HEAD of the DLC.
The DLC, for me, is as good a litmus as any, explains a great deal of the Democratic sell-out through several decades. Some believe that to see power at all the Dems must take the corporate road. I don't agree. But read "Obama, Inc.," the largely overlooked 2006 article by Silverstein in Harper's (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/11/0081275). Whatever his early beliefs, Mr. Obama clearly does.
If Obama is a Trojan horse for our side, he starts to show that now (right?) A spending freeze is hardly a promising step.
As for the rest of us--including me--the time has come to stop gaping, roll our sleeves back up and fight.