Wow. Mediocre. Weak. No leadership. Not tough enough to fight the right.
It's fucking surreal to drop in here from time to time, especially since I spend a fair amount of time on blogs that actually provide me with news, facts, details about what President Obama is achieving/has achieved. My Blogroll will take you there, although if you're sensitive I'd stay away from The People's View - Cenk would be appalled at the amount of hippie punching that goes on there, and deeply saddened by the views expressed re: the idiocy of the Professional Left.
Reading here reminds me so much of what was going on during the primaries and the general in the olden days - brilliant advice that would have, if followed, left us with John McCain dropping H-bombs on Iran and Sarah Palin leading Christ's Army against Godless Infidels. When she wasn't having botox injections and sculpting her ass and tits for next week's appearances.
We have the most progressive president of my lifetime (and I date back to Eisenhower) in the White House, and the best we can come up with is tolerance for or even slavish adoration for the "Primary Him" contingent?
I'd like to take a moment to reach back into history. FDR is a hero to today's progressives, a man of strength, a man who wasn't afraid to use the bully pulpit to save America from ruin. To the progressives of his time he was weak, ineffectual and a sellout. FDR was not so popular as you think!
According to the PL wisdom of his day, Social Security was a pale shadow of what it should have been because FDR sold out to Republicans again and again to get it passed. (Ditto Medicare, and Civil Rights in their times.) A little internet searching will take you to headlines that simply need to have a couple of words switched out (the name of the President, and the name of the program) to mirror the titles of diaries published here railing against HCR, or Obama's efforts at eliminating DADT and DOMA.
This week we love Al Gore because of careful editing of his comments on Global Warming and Pres. Obama. 11 and 12 years ago he was just the same as Bush, and boring, and ran a bad campaign. Democratic Underground on Al Gore Is Weak
Clinton is heroic in nostalgic memories, but he was a peckerhead not too long ago. A little Wiki refresher course
Carter? A whacked-out loser we primaried, and look how well that turned out for all of us! Today a man of vision. Please note the first comment
That's what we progressives allowed to happen to a really fine man.
In 20 years it will be Obama who's the hero who was cut off at the knees by a "base" underwritten and supported by the RW. And we'll still be a small minority, with no bench, no strong support in the wider Democratic Party. Why? Because we're too prone to jump before we think, to be ruled by emotion rather than fact. A classic example, a diary written from anger, with no research into background to check the facts, facts which show up early in the comments so must have been easy to locate. There are more of this kind of diary on the wreck list than there are those written by people who accumulate data, do some fact-checking, and don't allow themselves to be sucked into the outrage du jour.
Being committed to lofty ideals and curiously unfazed by reality seems the primary job of the Leftie Left. So far it doesn't seem to be working to anyone's advantage, but I say never quit doing the things that haven't worked in the past - someday there will be a tear in the space/time continuum and success will be yours!
I'm loaded with lofty ideals, but somehow ended up with a leavening of pragmatism. I'd rather have a beginning to build on than a purist defeat to take pride in. I guess the problem is that I can't forget the people who are hurt when perfection is the only acceptable outcome - the unemployed who would have been penniless if President Obama had refused to negotiate with Republicans on the budget, the Seniors having to choose between food and medication if changes to Medicare hadn't been included in the much-reviled ACA, the potential martyrs if DADT had been removed by presidential fiat rather than placing the job in the laps of the entities who created it.
Taking time to create an acceptable environment for change isn't as romantic or exciting as charging into the breach, weapons blazing, but it does tend to result in fewer "casualties". I like that outlook in a President. Bombing the shit out of OBL's compound may have ended up killing him, dramatically and with swagger, but keeping civilian casualties to a minimum and getting a whole lot of intel works much better for me.
How do we end up with such strange role models? Can anyone tell me why Jane Hamsher is not persona non grata here? A little background: Jane Hamsher, Progressive hero
How is it that we're so ready to be angry at the opposition, the media, the greedy corporations and wall street banksters but not at all ready to take responsibility for allowing it to happen? I suspect that we're afraid taking that step will mean we have to do something besides rage. Accepting that we took our eyes off the prize means committing to change, to hard work, to the pain of losing some and not winning as many as we dream about.
I had my activist period, when hippies were hippies, and we rarely got punched - shot at, maced, mocked, beat-on from time to time, but rarely punched. I marched, I wrote letters, I signed petitions, I joined Another Mother for Peace, and Clergy and Laymen Concerned, and I voted for George McGovern every chance I got. I worked for Don Frasier when he was running for re-election for Mayor of Mpls, and I loved the man! That's where I learned to phone bank, and to walk neighborhoods.
Then, like many of us, I got caught up in the complexity of marriages, raising children, paying bills, pursuing my dream of living in a nice house with pretty stuff around me. I was recovering from alcoholism, struggling with bi-polar disorder, trying really hard to fit into a world that didn't really suit me. I was BUSY dammit, and had a lot on my plate, so if Reagan was senile and destroying government, how could I be expected to realize how bad that was? If I didn't step in and fight the Republican noise machine when they chopped Clinton off at the knees, who could blame me? I was watching my final marriage crumble, and wondering how such a smart woman could make so many stupid decisions in one lifetime. I don't think I'm the only one
Besides, after JFK, MLK, and RFK were murdered, what was the point in hoping for something better? There were no genuine riots after the Bushies stole the presidency, Democrats were perfectly happy trashing Gore rather than rising up in outrage, so why should I stress out? What was the worst they could do? (DA and DT - it doesn't bear thinking about.)
So what's the matter, aren't I a True Progressive? Aren't I glad Arlen Specter is gone? Not really. Okay, Joe Lieberman, what an asshole. Not really - DADT would still be fully in place without him. All the Blue Dogs who were replaced by Tea Baggers? I'll send them all contributions if a miracle happens and they come back. What About Growing Some Spines??!!!???!!!! Well Alan Grayson had one hell of a spine, and he's been forcibly retired, and Tony Weiner, the darling of progressives was taken out by his propensity for photographing cucumbers or something. There's a downside to that personality type, the risk takers, the bully-pulpiters - they tend to not do the job they were elected to do, and thus are not wildly popular at home, or they have Issues that lead to scandal. And what legislation did they shepherd through Congress that changed lives? I haven't looked, I just can't remember them doing anything profound. Teddy Kennedy? I remember. A lot. And he had some ebil politician in him, some serious issues, but he was a genuine hero as well. How complex of him!
I first came here because I had a sense that this might be a place where serious thinkers hung out, where the difficulty of governing was understood, where our history was remembered and learned from. And there are still those people here, but I sometimes fear that most of those people who think, who know, who remember, have left, that most of the serious activists are busy changing the world through other portals. Far too often what I read here is tabloid journalism, half-truths, slanted visions, or regurgitated RW propaganda given a slightly leftish twist. Some days I wonder how many diarists are on the Koch Brothers or Roger Ailes payroll - surely not many, not enough to make a line item in the budget, but enough to create an atmosphere that is destructive to the future of my country. The fact that anyone here can seriously talk about primarying President Obama tells me that reality is so skewed it's hard to believe it can be restored. A Gift for those who say it doesn't happen here.
We have the first President in 80 years to manage the beginning of reforming our health care system, and instead of seeing ideas about how to improve on, build on that beginning I read endless screeds about its weaknesses and Obama's sellouts.
There's no conception that Government Health Care is a generally unpopular idea, a hard sell, to people who have had "Government is Bad" shoved down their throats for 40-something years. There's no admission that the Middle Class, or what's left of it, resisted losing the only benefit they had left to an untried and powerfully defamed Single-Payer Plan.
There's no understanding that using the bully pulpit is a foolish notion when it comes to selling something to people who are pretty thoroughly confused and frightened. What works is starting them out with something that will make small improvements in their lives without threatening their fundamental beliefs, then those small changes automatically shift the fundamental beliefs into an openness to something new. That could happen rather quickly, but won't happen at all unless Progressives get realistic and become willing to do the hard work of pushing those changes through. "But people don't like the ACA!" Looks pretty similar to me. And today Medicare is the Third Rail of politics. Hmmmmm.
"It's not good enough" is a very convenient hook - you can hang a shitload of apathy and laziness on that phrase and believe yourself to be a hero of the left. The reality of governing is that nothing worthwhile is as good as it started out to be, and it's still heroic to fight for what you can get, and fix it over time. We'd not be facing Paul Ryan's Race To The Bottom if we'd put as much energy into strengthening SS and Medicare as the Republicans have put into decimating them.
Progressives start with great ideas, and it seems we ultimately fail whenever we demand perfection. We wouldn't need to fight for Single-payer today if we'd gradually expanded Medicare over the last 40 years. The Progressives of the era blasted it's weaknesses when it was initially created, and that bought us 40 years of righteously neglecting it because it wasn't done our way. We'll fight when it's endangered, but won't tweak it when that's a hard row to hoe.
DADT wasn't done our way. DOMA still lives. Why doesn't Obama.....? Obama hates teh gays? Dan Choi's ass has to be chapped if he's read that - it' refutes all his complaints! The nerve!
CardCheck wasn't done our way, so who gives a shit if President Obama and the unions are doing an end-run around the Republican union-busters to make it easier for people to organize? NLRB changing the rules Just a nudge - sign the petition!!!
Why fight the RW about jobs when it's so much easier to whine about Obama on blogs? Where are the jobs? ::crickets:: Why dedicate an hour to getting on sites like that of your local paper, or AP, or Yahoo and laying out some facts? It's ugly out there, and much easier to hang with people who agree with you.
I didn't vote for nor would I continue to support a man who would give me swagger, tough talk, arrogance, or snappy decisions about complex issues.
I saw in Barack Obama someone with a genuine vision for the future of this country, and I believe that vision grew out of his experiences as a community organizer - he's been where few of us have been, talking to people few of us have met, seeing things we'd like not to know about. He's learned that you can't revile slumlords and expect them to work with you on improving living conditions - you might despise them in your secret heart, but you put your feelings away, and get what you can from them to improve the lives of desperate people. (Comes in handy when working with Boehner, Cantor, and Ryan.)
You learn that incremental sometimes gets you there faster.
You learn that most people aren't evil, they're just self-involved and thus insensitive.
You learn that raging doesn't result in success. You learn to plan, to collect information, to find out what people really want and really need, and you find ways to make that happen.
Go to some of those websites and start seeing what's happening. The Obama administration and some of it's corporate friends are building a manufacturing sector, right under the noses of the Republicans, that will most likely be the salvation of our economy. They're empowering small businesses in innumerable small ways, because that's the backbone of our economy. They're working with businesses and community colleges to train people to fill 3 million unfilled manufacturing jobs. Every overseas trip has a trade mission undercurrent.
If you start to learn about what I've been learning about you'll probably understand why I'm such a bitch in those WATB diaries. Our future depends on keeping the Republicans out of power, and I am ROYALLY pissed that we fucked that up in 2010. The potential fuckup for 2012 is in high gear. Please join me in throwing a few spanners into the works!