Charlie Pierce took a look at Obama’s endorsement of Joe Biden, and found much to make note of:
But then he went on into an unexpectedly reflective passage.
Because for the second time in 12 years, we’ll have the incredible task of rebuilding our economy. And to meet the moment, the Democratic Party will have to be bold. You know, I could not be prouder of the incredible progress we made together during my presidency. But, if I were running today, I wouldn’t run the same race, or have the same platform, as I did in 2008. The world is different. There’s too much unfinished business for us to just look backwards. We have to look to the future. Bernie understands that. And Joe understands that. It’s one of the reasons Joe has what is the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history. Because, even before the pandemic turned the world upside down, it was already clear that we needed...
Wait for it.
...real structural change.
And how are you, Senator Professor Warren?
As a Warren supporter, I definitely picked up that vibe. (*** Warren has now joined Sanders and Obama by endorsing Biden today.) I found this encouraging too, the section that Pierce quoted next:
The vast inequalities created by the new economy are easier to see now, but they existed long before this pandemic hit...We need to do more than tinker around the edges with tax credits and underfunded programs. We have to go further to give everybody a good education, a lasting career, and a stable retirement. We have to protect the gains we made with the Affordable Care Act, but it’s also time to go further. We should make plans affordable for everyone, provide everyone with a public option, expand Medicare, and finish the job so that health care isn’t just a right, but a reality for everybody.
Obama always has had a gift for the politics of the moment, an innate sense of what concerns are animating public issues and how best to answer them. Clearly, since January of 2017, he has watched the Democratic Party move left even from the politics of his administration. In endorsing Biden, he’s also endorsing that shift in the politics, and he’s suggesting quite obviously that Biden should get fully with the program as well. Obama endorsed Biden on Tuesday, but he also endorsed other things as well.
If you are a progressive, there is a lot to like in this message. I was generally pretty happy about it — until I went back and noticed the worm in the apple. This:
“There’s too much unfinished business for us to just look backwards.”
F*ck no!
Not looking backwards is why we are where we are today. It’s why we are still fighting — and too often losing — battles we should have never had to fight. Letting the GOP slide for inflicting George W. Bush on us is one of the things that made Trump possible, in so many ways. Letting Mitch McConnell get away with stealing a Supreme Court seat is why we may not have an election in November. Letting Moscow Mitch’s objections keep Obama from blowing the whistle on the Russians in 2016 is why our elections still aren’t secure in 2020.
I can understand why Obama may have been reluctant to be more confrontational; that does not seem to work out well for people of color. Given the racism now rampant under Trump, and the insane CT now permeating the right wing, it doesn’t seem that minimizing addressing it has worked out all that well. We are in Yeats territory these days. The answer is to Dream Big and Fight Hard.
In the middle of a pandemic when people are depending on government, how the f*ck do we let the Post Office risk going under? How the f*ck when people are literally struggling to breathe in ICUs are we letting clean air standards get rolled back? How the f*ck are we worrying about how government is going to pay for anything in the middle of yet another GOP-enabled economic collapse, and not talking about the Trump-McConnell giant tax cuts for the rich or the giant war deficits from the George W. Bush wars and the Great Recession or the giant Bush tax cuts? With Trump using White House virus briefings as campaign rallies, why the f*ck has it taken so long for the media to start wondering if giving Trump free air time is a political act, not journalism? Why the f*ck has impeachment vanished down the memory hole when every day gives us even more evidence why Trump is unfit to hold office?
We need to make accountability something that applies to Republicans/Conservatives, or they will learn nothing and just keep doing what they do.
I could continue ranting, but I’m going to try to wrap this up before it gets even farther into TL;DR territory. Let me see if I can reduce it to some sound bites.
- If you only look forward without looking back, you can’t learn from your mistakes.
- You can’t do real structural change on a rotten foundation.
- If you believe in "forgive and forget", you've never dealt with a conservative.
- Never confuse capitulation with bipartisanship or cooperation.
- Looking back and looking ahead is not mutually exclusive.
- Looking back is how to keep from getting stabbed in the back.
- Never appeal to a man’s better nature; he may not have one.
- Voting for Republicans is the triumph of wishful thinking over experience.
- You can always count on Republicans to do the right thing — when they have no other choice. Mostly…
- If you try to go forward without looking back to see where you’ve been, you risk going in circles.
- You will always have unfinished business if you never look back to see what you left undone.
- If not now, when?
- Beware of Republicans making promises.
- Instead of disaster capitalism, how about we try disaster socialism? It worked for FDR and America.
- It’s not the size of government that matters — it’s who is running it.
- Trying to solve big problems with small government is like trying to put out a house fire one spoonful of water at a time.
- Nobody ever balanced a budget with tax cuts.
- Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, don’t create jobs, and wealth doesn’t trickle down.
This is the big one:
Remember in November
Update: There are a lot of people taking issue with my problem with Obama saying we can’t just look backwards, arguing that he’s not saying we shouldn’t do it, just that it shouldn't be the only thing we do. And you know what, I don’t argue with that.
My problem is he gives just one sentence to that. When he says “The vast inequalities created by the new economy are easier to see now, but they existed long before this pandemic hit” it’s as though it was a natural event, not something the result of deliberate policy choices and actions by anyone. It just happened.
And that’s the problem I have with Obama on this — he’s still letting the people responsible for the current debacle off the hook. If you look at the two Obama quotes above, look at what’s missing: any explanation for who is responsible for the problems he cites or how they happened.
Go ahead and talk about the urgent things we need to do, the changes we need to make. But if you won’t talk about who is actively working to block all of them, it’s like trying to go to war without acknowledging the presence of the enemy army on the field who plans to exterminate you. (For f*cks sake — they openly admit it’s their goal.) It’s like saying “I really need to focus on overcoming my lung cancer, and not think about all the companies and politicians who encouraged me to develop a four pack-a-day Camels habit and want me to keep on smoking, or the doctors who did nothing to help me break that habit.”
See, this is the other side of not looking back. It’s not just about refusing to obsess about all the things the GOP has done, it’s also about refusing to acknowledge all the things you did or didn’t do that would have made a difference. Not looking back is the next best thing to refusing to see what is happening right in front of you, or to learn from the past.
There’s a saying that one definition of insanity it doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result. Another is taking every new day as having no connection to the past, and being surprised When. The. Same. Shit. Keeps. Happening. (The short attention span media is really good at this.)
Look — here’s the thing. Obama was and is a remarkable person. As a president he was highly competent, empathic — all the things Trump is not. But in eight years, neither he nor the Democratic Party was effective in dealing with, even recognizing, that the Republican Party has become an existential threat to America.
They were never able to come up with an effective response to GOP obstruction and outright criminality. They were unable to counter the conservative messaging machine, or the oligarchs funding them. (And how could they, when to call them out was considered ‘uncivil’ — even extremist?)
Obama is right when he says we shouldn’t just look backwards. But this is the thing: until we look backwards long enough to recognize the full scope of the problems we face, our failures along the way, and who is responsible, we are going to keep stumbling forward blind and oblivious while hoping for the best.
You think I’m exaggerating? Then why is there still so much fear Trump will get another term?