Look people, I know that diaries decrying the left for being suspicious of Barack Obama and especially his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel are popular hereabouts these days. And, I know how strong the instinct can be to get behind the team now that the Democratic party has finally crafted a Health Care bill which at least makes purchasing health insurance slightly more accessible (if compulsorily so) to millions of Americans. After all, even the great "progressive" economist, Paul Krugman, has rallied behind the legislation, so those of us on the political left should be happy for this exercise in Democratic party incrementalism, just like we were happy when Santa brought us underwear instead of the toy train or porcelain doll or whatever it is we really wanted.
But here's the thing. A lot of you, out there in mainstream Democratic party tent-land, are missing a few salient points. You'd do well to pick up on a few of them.
First, this isn't just about health care reform. It's also about badly needed financial reform, one which quite frankly is not being taken seriously enough by the Obama administration and which risks biting them on the ass, as banker's bonuses and corporate America's sense of ever-greater entitled-ness increasingly get laid at the feet of a Democratic party which increasingly will appear to do nothing about corporate abuses, financial deceit and raw corruption which fueled first the bubble and then the crash which enriched a very few elites while making everyone else lose their jobs, their homes, much or all of their savings. Rahm Emanuel's little issues, being currently pooh-poohed by many in the centrist blogosphere, certainly do not help on this score.
It's about absolute lack of accountability by economic and political elites and disappointment that the Obama administration, seemingly by design, appears to have seemlessly melded into it. This sentiment completes itself with the lack of accountability, beginning with Obama's refusal to take ownership of his own campaign promises.
It's about lack of visible progress in withdrawing from Iraq. It's about the escalation in Afghanistan despite increasing evidence of the uselessness of the war there as well. It's about DADT (and about having your Justice Department compare homosexuality to bestiality).
It's about sticking up your middle finger to the rhetoric employed to get the left on board in 2008.
And it's also about Rahm Emanuel and his distaste for the left in general. This is not simply the left wanting Rahm Emanuel's head on a pike just for the hell of it. This is about years of Rahm Emanuel giving his unprincipled middle finger to just about everyone to the left of him, often out of . simple spite and vanity.
Sorry guys and gals towards the center and right of the Democratic party. You can clap as loudly as you like. But, without some serious goodwill gestures, you will not regain the trust and confidence of large swathes of the left wing of the Democratic party. You may not get what Jane Hamsher is on about on FDL. But we do.
Rahm Emanuel must go. The man is a liability to the party, to the administration he serves, and to the public trust. Even if the hundreds of thousands the man may have taken as a Board Member of Freddie Mac are, legally-speaking, legit, even the appearance of impropriety and ill-got gains simply add to an increasing sense of this administration's complicity in the looting of working- and middle-class America.