There has been a lot of discussion about whether Obama is a weakling, a Corporist, or just a plain political moron, especially as it relates to the recent tax fight. I think Obama is weak just like Superman in Superman 2, and no, this is not snark.
There is a scene in Superman 2, where the evil General Zod pinpoints Superman’s weakness. As Superman was handily defeating General Zod and his crew in a battle in downtown Metropolis, a tower fell from the top of a building and was headed towards a crowd of innocent people watching the action from below. When Superman saw this, he stopped fighting and rushed to the rescue of the people and ultimately saved them. At that moment General Zod turned to his crew and said, "I’ve discovered his weakness, he actually cares about these people" From that moment on, Zod turned his fire on the innocent people, creating havoc everywhere and forcing superman to defend these attacks on multiple fronts to save the people. As this continued, Superman was forced to make a choice, save the people under direct fire or let them perish and continue the fight with Zod. Ultimately Superman decided to save the people from the immediate attacks and left the fight in the hopes of fighting a different kind of fight down the road because Superman did not have the heart to see innocent people die who he had the ability to save even if it might be better for everyone in the long run. To see the scene go to Superman 2 Fight, Zod’s eureka moment is at 3:45.
Similar choices have faced Obama throughout his term and he has consistently chosen to save the most vulnerable people and push the fight down the road. The stimulus bill was at its core designed to help states so they wouldn’t let go of hundreds of thousands of state employees, including teachers and save many social services that the states would have otherwise cut, affecting millions of lower income Americans. Similarly with health care, millions of citizens are losing healthcare every year. Obama’s core goal was to get as many people covered as possible. He did so by setting up exchanges and creating individual mandates, expanding Medicaid and opening up thousand of new primary care facilities. Similarly with this tax compromise he will be able extend the tax cuts for middle- and lower-income Americans, extend a number of tax breaks for middle- and lower-income Americans that were included in last year’s economic stimulus plan and of course extend unemployment benefits to millions of Americans. I haven’t even mentioned what he did for the auto industry that probably saved over a million jobs and which nobody wants to talk about. There were of course other major benefits to the actions Obama has taken but I don’t want to lose sight of what was at the core of them.
What did he have to do to get these things? He had to give into some of the demands of the wealthiest 1 percent which are represented by the GOP and a number of Democrats and their lies the rub. I call them ruling class; you know the ruling class, the chamber of congress, the insurance industry, Halliburton, the Free Masons, Aqua Buddha’s and all the other groups that Rachael Maddow regularly chronicles. He dropped the public option in healthcare, he put in unstimulative tax cuts in the stimulus plan and he is giving away billions in tax cuts for the ruling class’s which will have a limited effect on the economy other then to raise the deficit.
The problem is as I think Obama sees is that the cost of getting nothing in a fight outweighs the gain of winning a fight and that losing the fight is a lot more possible then people on the left believe. Guess what, we live in a capitalist society and in a capitalist society money rules. Sorry to tell folks but the ruling class are the employers and if they don’t want to hire here in America they won’t regardless of any government policy short of communism. Even worse the ruling class now controls political advertising thanks to Citizen’s United and they have fox news and any number of other outlets they never used to have in the media to distort the truth.
For all the folks at the Huffington Post, New York Times, HBO, Firedog Lake, Rolling Stone, and many here, the so-called real progressives, they never talk about this. They never tell you that to win a fight you need to be willing to sacrifice folks and they never tell you who those folks are. They never talk about the immediate price that middle income and especially poor people would have to face when you engage in the kind of fights they want to get into and lose and if you want to engage in those fights you have to be willing to lose and yes, you damn well might lose.
For all those who want to let all the tax cuts and unemployment benefits expire to make a political statement what happens to all those people who are negatively affected by that? What about the overall economy in general in the short term? It’s easy for pundits to push for a fight, they have no responsibility. They are not responsible if unemployment insurance expires and a single mother with 3 children loses their apartment because her unemployment insurance runs out, they’re not responsible if those 3 kids can’t get health care, Obama is. Of course all the pundits have jobs and most of them are in the upper tax bracket that they rail against so they can afford to lose the fight, its academic to most of them which is what I think Robert Gibbs referred to when he said the "Professional left".
As for the fight, those who think the GOP would blink in the tax fight, they won’t. If they wealthiest don’t get their tax break no one does, they don’t care. They would even put our national security on the line for it. At the end of the day tax cuts for the wealthy is all they care about, to give that up means they gave up everything they really care about and they won’t do that. To them money is power and relinquishing money is the same as relinquishing power. What makes the GOP so powerful is that they don’t have the burden of caring about average people.
The problem for Obama is how you fight people who don’t care about average people and are willing and able to punish them. It seems to me that Obama feels more comfortable in trying to get what he thinks he can for lower and middle class Americans than fighting and beating the ruling class, so yes Obama is weak, he cares about people.